GOD THE INVISIBLE KING

by H. G. Wells



CONTENTS


PREFACE

1.  THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION

2.  HERESIES; OR THE THINGS THAT GOD IS NOT

3.  THE LIKENESS OF GOD

4.  THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS

5.  THE INVISIBLE KING

6.  MODERN IDEAS OF SIN AND DAMNATION

7.  THE IDEA OF A CHURCH

THE ENVOY




PREFACE


This book sets out as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious 
belief of the writer.  That belief is not orthodox Christianity; it 
is not, indeed, Christianity at all; its core nevertheless is a 
profound belief in a personal and intimate God.  There is nothing in 
its statements that need shock or offend anyone who is prepared for 
the expression of a faith different from and perhaps in several 
particulars opposed to his own.  The writer will be found to be 
sympathetic with all sincere religious feeling.  Nevertheless it is 
well to prepare the prospective reader for statements that may jar 
harshly against deeply rooted mental habits.  It is well to warn him 
at the outset that the departure from accepted beliefs is here no 
vague scepticism, but a quite sharply defined objection to dogmas 
very widely revered.  Let the writer state the most probable 
occasion of trouble forthwith.  An issue upon which this book will 
be found particularly uncompromising is the dogma of the Trinity.  
The writer is of opinion that the Council of Nicaea, which forcibly 
crystallised the controversies of two centuries and formulated the 
creed upon which all the existing Christian churches are based, was 
one of the most disastrous and one of the least venerable of all 
religious gatherings, and he holds that the Alexandrine speculations 
which were then conclusively imposed upon Christianity merit only 
disrespectful attention at the present time.  There you have a chief 
possibility of offence.  He is quite unable to pretend any awe for 
what he considers the spiritual monstrosities established by that 
undignified gathering.  He makes no attempt to be obscure or 
propitiatory in this connection.  He criticises the creeds 
explicitly and frankly, because he believes it is particularly 
necessary to clear them out of the way of those who are seeking 
religious consolation at this present time of exceptional religious 
need.  He does little to conceal his indignation at the role played 
by these dogmas in obscuring, perverting, and preventing the 
religious life of mankind.  After this warning such readers from 
among the various Christian churches and sects as are accessible to 
storms of theological fear or passion to whom the Trinity is an 
ineffable mystery and the name of God almost unspeakably awful, read 
on at their own risk.  This is a religious book written by a 
believer, but so far as their beliefs and religion go it may seem to 
them more sceptical and more antagonistic than blank atheism.  That 
the writer cannot tell.  He is not simply denying their God.  He is 
declaring that there is a living God, different altogether from that 
Triune God and nearer to the heart of man.  The spirit of this book 
is like that of a missionary who would only too gladly overthrow and 
smash some Polynesian divinity of shark's teeth and painted wood and 
mother-of-pearl.  To the writer such elaborations as "begotten of 
the Father before all worlds" are no better than intellectual 
shark's teeth and oyster shells.  His purpose, like the purpose of 
that missionary, is not primarily to shock and insult; but he is 
zealous to liberate, and he is impatient with a reverence that 
stands between man and God.  He gives this fair warning and proceeds 
with his matter.

His matter is modern religion as he sees it.  It is only 
incidentally and because it is unavoidable that he attacks doctrinal 
Christianity.

In a previous book, "First and Last Things" (Constable and Co.), he 
has stated his convictions upon certain general ideas of life and 
thought as clearly as he could.  All of philosophy, all of 
metaphysics that is, seems to him to be a discussion of the 
relations of class and individual.  The antagonism of the Nominalist 
and the Realist, the opposition of the One and the Many, the 
contrast of the Ideal and the Actual, all these oppositions express 
a certain structural and essential duality in the activity of the 
human mind.  From an imperfect recognition of that duality ensue 
great masses of misconception.  That was the substance of "First and 
Last Things."  In this present book there is no further attack on 
philosophical or metaphysical questions.  Here we work at a less 
fundamental level and deal with religious feeling and religious 
ideas.  But just as the writer was inclined to attribute a whole 
world of disputation and inexactitudes to confused thinking about 
the exact value of classes and terms, so here he is disposed to 
think that interminable controversies and conflicts arise out of a 
confusion of intention due to a double meaning of the word "God"; 
that the word "God" conveys not one idea or set of ideas, but 
several essentially different ideas, incompatible one with another, 
and falling mainly into one or other of two divergent groups; and 
that people slip carelessly from one to the other of these groups of 
ideas and so get into ultimately inextricable confusions.

The writer believes that the centuries of fluid religious thought 
that preceded the violent ultimate crystallisation of Nicaea, was 
essentially a struggle--obscured, of course, by many complexities--
to reconcile and get into a relationship these two separate main 
series of God-ideas.

Putting the leading id a part against evil.

The writer believes that these dogmas of relationship are not merely 
extraneous to religion, but an impediment to religion.  His aim in 
this book is to give a statement of religion which is no longer 
entangled in such speculations and disputes.


Let him add only one other note of explanation in this preface, and 
that is to remark that except for one incidental passage (in Chapter 
IV., 1), nowhere does he discuss the question of personal 
immortality.  [It is discussed in "First and Last Things," Book IV, 
4.]  He omits this question because he does not consider that it has 
any more bearing upon the essentials of religion, than have the 
theories we may hold about the relation of God and the moral law to 
the starry universe.  The latter is a question for the theologian, 
the former for the psychologist.  Whether we are mortal or immortaea of this book very roughly, these two 
antagonistic typical conceptions of God may be best contrasted by 
speaking of one of them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the 
other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer.  One is the great Outward 
God; the other is the Inmost God.  The first idea was perhaps 
developed most highly and completely in the God of Spinoza.  It is a 
conception of God tending to pantheism, to an idea of a 
comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection, to a 
conception of aloofness and awestriking worshipfulness.  The second 
idea, which is opposed to this idea of an absolute God, is the God 
of the human heart.  The writer would suggest that the great outline 
of the theological struggles of that phase of civilisation and world 
unity which produced Christianity, was a persistent but unsuccessful 
attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus.  It 
was an attempt to make the God of Nature accessible and the God of 
the Heart invincible, to bring the former into a conception of love 
and to vest the latter with the beauty of stars and flowers and the 
dignity of inexorable justice.  There could be no finer metaphor for 
such a correlation than Fatherhood and Sonship.  But the trouble is 
that it seems impossible to most people to continue to regard the 
relations of the Father to the Son as being simply a mystical 
metaphor.  Presently some materialistic bias swings them in a moment 
of intellectual carelessness back to the idea of sexual filiation.

And it may further be suggested that the extreme aloofness and 
inhumanity, which is logically necessary in the idea of a Creator 
God, of an Infinite God, was the reason, so to speak, for the 
invention of a Holy Spirit, as something proceeding from him, as 
something bridging the great gulf, a Comforter, a mediator 
descending into the sphere of the human understanding.  That, and 
the suggestive influence of the Egyptian Trinity that was then being 
worshipped at the Serapeum, and which had saturated the thought of 
Alexandria with the conception of a trinity in unity, are probably 
the realities that account for the Third Person of the Christian 
Trinity.  At any rate the present writer believes that the 
discussions that shaped the Christian theology we know were 
dominated by such natural and fundamental thoughts.  These 
discussions were, of course, complicated from the outset; and 
particularly were they complicated by the identification of the man 
Jesus with the theological Christ, by materialistic expectations of 
his second coming, by materialistic inventions about his 
"miraculous" begetting, and by the morbid speculations about 
virginity and the like that arose out of such grossness.  They were 
still further complicated by the idea of the textual inspiration of 
the scriptures, which presently swamped thought in textual 
interpretation.  That swamping came very early in the development of 
Christianity.  The writer of St. John's gospel appears still to be 
thinking with a considerable freedom, but Origen is already 
hopelessly in the net of the texts.  The writer of St. John's gospel 
was a free man, but Origen was a superstitious man.  He was 
emasculated mentally as well as bodily through his bibliolatry.  He 
quotes; his predecessor thinks.

But the writer throws out these guesses at the probable intentions 
of early Christian thought in passing.  His business here is the 
definition of a position.  The writer's position here in this book 
is, firstly, complete Agnosticism in the matter of God the Creator, 
and secondly, entire faith in the matter of God the Redeemer.  That, 
so to speak, is the key of his book.  He cannot bring the two ideas 
under the same term God.  He uses the word God therefore for the God 
in our hearts only, and he uses the term the Veiled Being for the 
ultimate mysteries of the universe, and he declares that we do not 
know and perhaps cannot know in any comprehensible terms the 
relation of the Veiled Being to that living reality in our lives who 
is, in his terminology, the true God.  Speaking from the point of 
view of practical religion, he is restricting and defining the word 
God, as meaning only the personal God of mankind, he is restricting 
it so as to exclude all cosmogony and ideas of providence from our 
religious thought and leave nothing but the essentials of the 
religious life.

Many people, whom one would class as rather liberal Christians of an 
Arian or Arminian complexion, may find the larger part of this book 
acceptable to them if they will read "the Christ God" where the 
writer has written "God."  They will then differ from him upon 
little more than the question whether there is an essential identity 
in aim and quality between the Christ God and the Veiled Being, who 
answer to their Creator God.  This the orthodox post Nicaean 
Christians assert, and many pre-Nicaeans and many heretics (as the 
Cathars) contradicted with its exact contrary.  The Cathars, 
Paulicians, Albigenses and so on held, with the Manichaeans, that 
the God of Nature, God the Father, was evil.  The Christ God was his 
antagonist.  This was the idea of the poet Shelley.  And passing 
beyond Christian theology altogether a clue can still be found to 
many problems in comparative theology in this distinction between 
the Being of Nature (cf.  Kant's "starry vault above") and the God 
of the heart (Kant's "moral law within").  The idea of an antagonism 
seems to have been cardinal in the thought of the Essenes and the 
Orphic cult and in the Persian dualism.  So, too, Buddhism seems to 
be "antagonistic."  On the other hand, the Moslem teaching and 
modern Judaism seem absolutely to combine and identify the two; God 
the creator is altogether and without distinction also God the King 
of Mankind.  Christianity stands somewhere between such complete 
identification and complete antagonism.  It admits a difference in 
attitude between Father and Son in its distinction between the Old 
Dispensation (of the Old Testament) and the New.  Every possible 
change is rung in the great religions of the world between 
identification, complete separation, equality, and disproportion of 
these Beings; but it will be found that these two ideas are, so to 
speak, the basal elements of all theology in the world.  The writer 
is chary of assertion or denial in these matters.  He believes that 
they are speculations not at all necessary to salvation.  He 
believes that men may differ profoundly in their opinions upon these 
points and still be in perfect agreement upon the essentials of 
religion.  The reality of religion he believes deals wholly and 
exclusively with the God of the Heart.  He declares as his own 
opinion, and as the opinion which seems most expressive of modern 
thought, that there is no reason to suppose the Veiled Being either 
benevolent or malignant towards men.  But if the reader believes 
that God is Almighty and in every way Infinite the practical outcome 
is not very different.  For the purposes of human relationship it is 
impossible to deny that God PRESENTS HIMSELF AS FINITE, as 
struggling and takingl, 
whether the God in our hearts is the Son of or a rebel against the 
Universe, the reality of religion, the fact of salvation, is still 
our self-identification with God, irrespective of consequences, and 
the achievement of his kingdom, in our hearts and in the world.  
Whether we live forever or die tomorrow does not affect 
righteousness.  Many people seem to find the prospect of a final 
personal death unendurable.  This impresses me as egotism.  I have 
no such appetite for a separate immortality.  God is my immortality; 
what, of me, is identified with God, is God; what is not is of no 
more permanent value than the snows of yester-year.

H. G. W.

Dunmow,
May, 1917.




GOD THE INVISIBLE KING


CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION


1. MODERN RELIGION HAS NO FOUNDER


Perhaps all religions, unless the flaming onset of Mohammedanism be 
an exception, have dawned imperceptibly upon the world.  A little 
while ago and the thing was not; and then suddenly it has been found 
in existence, and already in a state of diffusion.  People have 
begun to hear of the new belief first here and then there.  It is 
interesting, for example, to trace how Christianity drifted into the 
consciousness of the Roman world.  But when a religion has been 
interrogated it has always had hitherto a tale of beginnings, the 
name and story of a founder.  The renascent religion that is now 
taking shape, it seems, had no founder; it points to no origins.  It 
is the Truth, its believers declare; it has always been here; it has 
always been visible to those who had eyes to see.  It is perhaps 
plainer than it was and to more people--that is all.

It is as if it still did not realise its own difference.  Many of 
those who hold it still think of it as if it were a kind of 
Christianity.  Some, catching at a phrase of Huxley's, speak of it 
as Christianity without Theology.  They do not know the creed they 
are carrying.  It has, as a matter of fact, a very fine and subtle 
theology, flatly opposed to any belief that could, except by great 
stretching of charity and the imagination, be called Christianity.  
One might find, perhaps, a parallelism with the system ascribed to 
some Gnostics, but that is far more probably an accidental rather 
than a sympathetic coincidence.  Of that the reader shall presently 
have an opportunity of judging.

This indefiniteness of statement and relationship is probably only 
the opening phase of the new faith.  Christianity also began with an 
extreme neglect of definition.  It was not at first anything more 
than a sect of Judaism.  It was only after three centuries, amidst 
the uproar and emotions of the council of Nicaea, when the more 
enthusiastic Trinitarians stuffed their fingers in their ears in 
affected horror at the arguments of old Arius, that the cardinal 
mystery of the Trinity was established as the essential fact of 
Christianity.  Throughout those three centuries, the centuries of 
its greatest achievements and noblest martyrdoms, Christianity had 
not defined its God.  And even to-day it has to be noted that a 
large majority of those who possess and repeat the Christian creeds 
have come into the practice so insensibly from unthinking childhood, 
that only in the slightest way do they realise the nature of the 
statements to which they subscribe.  They will speak and think of 
both Christ and God in ways flatly incompatible with the doctrine of 
the Triune deity upon which, theoretically, the entire fabric of all 
the churches rests.  They will show themselves as frankly Arians as 
though that damnable heresy had not been washed out of the world 
forever after centuries of persecution in torrents of blood.  But 
whatever the present state of Christendom in these matters may be, 
there can be no doubt of the enormous pains taken in the past to 
give Christian beliefs the exactest, least ambiguous statement 
possible.  Christianity knew itself clearly for what it was in its 
maturity, whatever the indecisions of its childhood or the 
confusions of its decay.  The renascent religion that one finds now, 
a thing active and sufficient in many minds, has still scarcely come 
to self-consciousness.  But it is so coming, and this present book 
is very largely an attempt to state the shape it is assuming and to 
compare it with the beliefs and imperatives and usages of the 
various Christian, pseudo-Christian, philosophical, and agnostic 
cults amidst which it has appeared.

The writer's sympathies and convictions are entirely with this that 
he speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist 
nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian.  He will make no 
pretence, therefore, to impartiality and detachment.  He will do his 
best to be as fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the 
reader must reckon with this bias.  He has found this faith growing 
up in himself; he has found it, or something very difficult to 
distinguish from it, growing independently in the minds of men and 
women he has met.  They have been people of very various origins; 
English, Americans, Bengalis, Russians, French, people brought up in 
a "Catholic atmosphere," Positivists, Baptists, Sikhs, Mohammedans.  
Their diversity of source is as remarkable as their convergence of 
tendency.  A miscellany of minds thinking upon parallel lines has 
come out to the same light.  The new teaching is also traceable in 
many professedly Christian religious books and it is to be heard 
from Christian pulpits.  The phase of definition is manifestly at 
hand.



2. MODERN RELIGION HAS A FINITE GOD


Perhaps the most fundamental difference between this new faith and 
any recognised form of Christianity is that, knowingly or 
unknowingly, it worships A FINITE GOD.  Directly the believer is 
fairly confronted with the plain questions of the case, the vague 
identifications that are still carelessly made with one or all of 
the persons of the Trinity dissolve away.  He will admit that his 
God is neither all-wise, nor all-powerful, nor omnipresent; that he 
is neither the maker of heaven nor earth, and that he has little to 
identify him with that hereditary God of the Jews who became the 
"Father" in the Christian system.  On the other hand he will assert 
that his God is a god of salvation, that he is a spirit, a person, a 
strongly marked and knowable personality, loving, inspiring, and 
lovable, who exists or strives to exist in every human soul.  He 
will be much less certain in his denials that his God has a close 
resemblance to the Pauline (as distinguished from the Trinitarian) 
"Christ." . . .

The modern religious man will almost certainly profess a kind of 
universalism; he will assert that whensoever men have called upon 
any God and have found fellowship and comfort and courage and that 
sense of God within them, that inner light which is the quintessence 
of the religious experience, it was the True God that answered them.  
For the True God is a generous God, not a jealous God; the very 
antithesis of that bickering monopolist who "will have none other 
gods but Me"; and when a human heart cries out--to what name it 
matters not--for a larger spirit and a stronger help than the 
visible things of life can give, straightway the nameless Helper is 
with it and the God of Man answers to the call.  The True God has no 
scorn nor hate for those who have accepted the many-handed symbols 
of the Hindu or the lacquered idols of China.  Where there is faith, 
where there is need, there is the True God ready to clasp the hands 
that stretch out seeking for him into the darkness behind the ivory 
and gold.

The fact that God is FINITE is one upon which those who think 
clearly among the new believers are very insistent.  He is, above 
everything else, a personality, and to be a personality is to have 
characteristics, to be limited by characteristics; he is a Being, 
not us but dealing with us and through us, he has an aim and that 
means he has a past and future; he is within time and not outside 
it.  And they point out that this is really what everyone who prays 
sincerely to God or gets help from God, feels and believes.  Our 
practice with God is better than our theory.  None of us really pray 
to that fantastic, unqualified danse a trois, the Trinity, which the 
wranglings and disputes of the worthies of Alexandria and Syria 
declared to be God.  We pray to one single understanding person.  
But so far the tactics of those Trinitarians at Nicaea, who stuck 
their fingers in their ears, have prevailed in this world; this was 
no matter for discussion, they declared, it was a Holy Mystery full 
of magical terror, and few religious people have thought it worth 
while to revive these terrors by a definite contradiction.  The 
truly religious have been content to lapse quietly into the 
comparative sanity of an unformulated Arianism, they have left it to 
the scoffing Atheist to mock at the patent absurdities of the 
official creed.  But one magnificent protest against this 
theological fantasy must have been the work of a sincerely religious 
man, the cold superb humour of that burlesque creed, ascribed, at 
first no doubt facetiously and then quite seriously, to Saint 
Athanasius the Great, which, by an irony far beyond its original 
intention, has become at last the accepted creed of the church.

The long truce in the criticism of Trinitarian theology is drawing 
to its end.  It is when men most urgently need God that they become 
least patient with foolish presentations and dogmas.  The new 
believers are very definitely set upon a thorough analysis of the 
nature and growth of the Christian creeds and ideas.  There has 
grown up a practice of assuming that, when God is spoken of, the 
Hebrew-Christian God of Nicaea is meant.  But that God trails with 
him a thousand misconceptions and bad associations; his alleged 
infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange preferences, his 
vindictive Old Testament past.  These things do not even make a 
caricature of the True God; they compose an altogether different and 
antagonistic figure.

It is a very childish and unphilosophical set of impulses that has 
led the theologians of nearly every faith to claim infinite 
qualities for their deity.  One has to remember the poorness of the 
mental and moral quality of the churchmen of the third, fourth, and 
fifth centuries who saddled Christendom with its characteristic 
dogmas, and the extreme poverty and confusion of the circle of ideas 
within which they thought.  Many of these makers of Christianity, 
like Saint Ambrose of Milan (who had even to be baptised after his 
election to his bishopric), had been pitchforked into the church 
from civil life; they lived in a time of pitiless factions and 
personal feuds; they had to conduct their disputations amidst the 
struggles of would-be emperors; court eunuchs and favourites swayed 
their counsels, and popular rioting clinched their decisions.  There 
was less freedom of discussion then in the Christian world than 
there is at present (1916) in Belgium, and the whole audience of 
educated opinion by which a theory could be judged did not equal, 
either in numbers or accuracy of information, the present population 
of Constantinople.  To these conditions we owe the claim that the 
Christian God is a magic god, very great medicine in battle, "in hoc 
signo vinces," and the argument so natural to the minds of those 
days and so absurd to ours, that since he had ALL power, all 
knowledge, and existed for ever and ever, it was no use whatever to 
set up any other god against him. . . .

By the fifth century Christianity had adopted as its fundamental 
belief, without which everyone was to be "damned everlastingly," a 
conception of God and of Christ's relation to God, of which even by 
the Christian account of his teaching, Jesus was either totally 
unaware or so negligent and careless of the future comfort of his 
disciples as scarcely to make mention.  The doctrine of the Trinity, 
so far as the relationship of the Third Person goes, hangs almost 
entirely upon one ambiguous and disputed utterance in St. John's 
gospel (XV. 26).  Most of the teachings of Christian orthodoxy 
resolve themselves to the attentive student into assertions of the 
nature of contradiction and repartee.  Someone floats an opinion in 
some matter that has been hitherto vague, in regard, for example, to 
the sonship of Christ or to the method of his birth.  The new 
opinion arouses the hostility and alarm of minds unaccustomed to so 
definite a statement, and in the zeal of their recoil they fly to a 
contrary proposition.  The Christians would neither admit that they 
worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor deny the 
divinity of Christ because of the Jews.  They dreaded to be 
polytheistic; equally did they dread the least apparent detraction 
from the power and importance of their Saviour.  They were forced 
into the theory of the Trinity by the necessity of those contrary 
assertions, and they had to make it a mystery protected by curses to 
save it from a reductio ad absurdam.  The entire history of the 
growth of the Christian doctrine in those disordered early centuries 
is a history of theology by committee; a history of furious 
wrangling, of hasty compromises, and still more hasty attempts to 
clinch matters by anathema.  When the muddle was at its very worst, 
the church was confronted by enormous political opportunities.  In 
order that it should seize these one chief thing appeared 
imperative: doctrinal uniformity.  The emperor himself, albeit 
unbaptised and very ignorant of Greek, came and seated himself in 
the midst of Christian thought upon a golden throne.  At the end of 
it all Eusebius, that supreme Trimmer, was prepared to damn 
everlastingly all those who doubted that consubstantiality he 
himself had doubted at the beginning of the conference.  It is quite 
clear that Constantine did not care who was damned or for what 
period, so long as the Christians ceased to wrangle among 
themselves.  The practical unanimity of Nicaea was secured by 
threats, and then, turning upon the victors, he sought by threats to 
restore Arius to communion.  The imperial aim was a common faith to 
unite the empire.  The crushing out of the Arians and of the 
Paulicians and suchlike heretics, and more particularly the 
systematic destruction by the orthodox of all heretical writings, 
had about it none of that quality of honest conviction which comes 
to those who have a real knowledge of God; it was a bawling down of 
dissensions that, left to work themselves out, would have spoilt 
good business; it was the fist of Nicolas of Myra over again, except 
that after the days of Ambrose the sword of the executioner and the 
fires of the book-burner were added to the weapon of the human 
voice.  Priscillian was the first human sacrifice formally offered 
up under these improved conditions to the greater glory of the 
reinforced Trinity.  Thereafter the blood of the heretics was the 
cement of Christian unity.

It is with these things in mind that those who profess the new faith 
are becoming so markedly anxious to distinguish God from the 
Trinitarian's deity.  At present if anyone who has left the 
Christian communion declares himself a believer in God, priest and 
parson swell with self-complacency.  There is no reason why they 
should do so.  That many of us have gone from them and found God is 
no concern of theirs.  It is not that we who went out into the 
wilderness which we thought to be a desert, away from their creeds 
and dogmas, have turned back and are returning.  It is that we have 
gone on still further, and are beyond that desolation.  Never more 
shall we return to those who gather under the cross.  By faith we 
disbelieved and denied.  By faith we said of that stuffed scarecrow 
of divinity, that incoherent accumulation of antique theological 
notions, the Nicene deity, "This is certainly no God."  And by faith 
we have found God. . . .



3. THE INFINITE BEING IS NOT GOD


There has always been a demand upon the theological teacher that he 
should supply a cosmogony.  It has always been an effective 
propagandist thing to say: "OUR God made the whole universe.  Don't 
you think that it would be wise to abandon YOUR deity, who did not, 
as you admit, do anything of the sort?"

The attentive reader of the lives of the Saints will find that this 
style of argument did in the past bring many tribes and nations into 
the Christian fold.  It was second only to the claim of magic 
advantages, demonstrated by a free use of miracles.  Only one great 
religious system, the Buddhist, seems to have resisted the 
temptation to secure for its divinity the honour and title of 
Creator.  Modern religion is like Buddhism in that respect.  It 
offers no theory whatever about the origin of the universe.  It does 
not reach behind the appearances of space and time.  It sees only a 
featureless presumption in that playing with superlatives which has 
entertained so many minds from Plotinus to the Hegelians with the 
delusion that such negative terms as the Absolute or the 
Unconditioned, can assert anything at all.  At the back of all known 
things there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of existence 
is a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or death or 
good or ill.  Of that Being, whether it is simple or complex or 
divine, we know nothing; to us it is no more than the limit of 
understanding, the unknown beyond.  It may be of practically 
limitless intricacy and possibility.  The new religion does not 
pretend that the God of its life is that Being, or that he has any 
relation of control or association with that Being.  It does not 
even assert that God knows all or much more than we do about that 
ultimate Being.

For us life is a matter of our personalities in space and time.  
Human analysis probing with philosophy and science towards the 
Veiled Being reveals nothing of God, reveals space and time only as 
necessary forms of consciousness, glimpses a dance of atoms, of 
whirls in the ether.  Some day in the endless future there may be a 
knowledge, an understanding of relationship, a power and courage 
that will pierce into those black wrappings.  To that it may be our 
God, the Captain of Mankind will take us.

That now is a mere speculation.  The veil of the unknown is set with 
the stars; its outer texture is ether and atom and crystal.  The 
Veiled Being, enigmatical and incomprehensible, broods over the 
mirror upon which the busy shapes of life are moving.  It is as if 
it waited in a great stillness.  Our lives do not deal with it, and 
cannot deal with it.  It may be that they may never be able to deal 
with it.



4. THE LIFE FORCE IS NOT GOD


So it is that comprehensive setting of the universe presents itself 
to the modern mind.  It is altogether outside good and evil and love 
and hate.  It is outside God, who is love and goodness.  And coming 
out of this veiled being, proceeding out of it in a manner 
altogether inconceivable, is another lesser being, an impulse 
thrusting through matter and clothing itself in continually changing 
material forms, the maker of our world, Life, the Will to Be.  It 
comes out of that inscrutable being as a wave comes rolling to us 
from beyond the horizon.  It is as it were a great wave rushing 
through matter and possessed by a spirit.  It is a breeding, 
fighting thing; it pants through the jungle track as the tiger and 
lifts itself towards heaven as the tree; it is the rabbit bolting 
for its life and the dove calling to her mate; it crawls, it flies, 
it dives, it lusts and devours, it pursues and eats itself in order 
to live still more eagerly and hastily; it is every living thing, of 
it are our passions and desires and fears.  And it is aware of 
itself not as a whole, but dispersedly as individual self-
consciousness, starting out dispersedly from every one of the 
sentient creatures it has called into being.  They look out for 
their little moments, red-eyed and fierce, full of greed, full of 
the passions of acquisition and assimilation and reproduction, 
submitting only to brief fellowships of defence or aggression.  They 
are beings of strain and conflict and competition.  They are living 
substance still mingled painfully with the dust.  The forms in which 
this being clothes itself bear thorns and fangs and claws, are 
soaked with poison and bright with threats or allurements, prey 
slyly or openly on one another, hold their own for a little while, 
breed savagely and resentfully, and pass. . . .

This second Being men have called the Life Force, the Will to Live, 
the Struggle for Existence.  They have figured it too as Mother 
Nature.  We may speculate whether it is not what the wiser among the 
Gnostics meant by the Demiurge, but since the Christians destroyed 
all the Gnostic books that must remain a mere curious guess.  We may 
speculate whether this heat and haste and wrath of life about us is 
the Dark God of the Manichees, the evil spirit of the sun 
worshippers.  But in contemporary thought there is no conviction 
apparent that this Demiurge is either good or evil; it is conceived 
of as both good and evil.  If it gives all the pain and conflict of 
life, it gives also the joy of the sunshine, the delight and hope of 
youth, the pleasures.  If it has elaborated a hundred thousand sorts 
of parasite, it has also moulded the beautiful limbs of man and 
woman; it has shaped the slug and the flower.  And in it, as part of 
it, taking its rewards, responding to its goads, struggling against 
the final abandonment to death, do we all live, as the beasts live, 
glad, angry, sorry, revengeful, hopeful, weary, disgusted, 
forgetful, lustful, happy, excited, bored, in pain, mood after mood 
but always fearing death, with no certainty and no coherence within 
us, until we find God.  And God comes to us neither out of the stars 
nor out of the pride of life, but as a still small voice within.



5. GOD IS WITHIN


God comes we know not whence, into the conflict of life.  He works 
in men and through men.  He is a spirit, a single spirit and a 
single person; he has begun and he will never end.  He is the 
immortal part and leader of mankind.  He has motives, he has 
characteristics, he has an aim.  He is by our poor scales of 
measurement boundless love, boundless courage, boundless generosity.  
He is thought and a steadfast will.  He is our friend and brother 
and the light of the world.  That briefly is the belief of the 
modern mind with regard to God.  There is no very novel idea about 
this God, unless it be the idea that he had a beginning.  This is 
the God that men have sought and found in all ages, as God or as the 
Messiah or the Saviour.  The finding of him is salvation from the 
purposelessness of life.  The new religion has but disentangled the 
idea of him from the absolutes and infinities and mysteries of the 
Christian theologians; from mythological virgin births and the 
cosmogonies and intellectual pretentiousness of a vanished age.

Modern religion appeals to no revelation, no authoritative teaching, 
no mystery.  The statement it makes is, it declares, a mere 
statement of what we may all perceive and experience.  We all live 
in the storm of life, we all find our understandings limited by the 
Veiled Being; if we seek salvation and search within for God, 
presently we find him.  All this is in the nature of things.  If 
every one who perceives and states it were to be instantly killed 
and blotted out, presently other people would find their way to the 
same conclusions; and so on again and again.  To this all true 
religion, casting aside its hulls of misconception, must ultimately 
come.  To it indeed much religion is already coming.  Christian 
thought struggles towards it, with the millstones of Syrian theology 
and an outrageous mythology of incarnation and resurrection about 
its neck.  When at last our present bench of bishops join the early 
fathers of the church in heaven there will be, I fear, a note of 
reproach in their greeting of the ingenious person who saddled them 
with OMNIPOTENS.  Still more disastrous for them has been the virgin 
birth, with the terrible fascination of its detail for unpoetic 
minds.  How rich is the literature of authoritative Christianity 
with decisions upon the continuing virginity of Mary and the 
virginity of Joseph--ideas that first arose in Arabia as a Moslem 
gloss upon Christianity--and how little have these peepings and 
pryings to do with the needs of the heart and the finding of God!

Within the last few years there have been a score or so of such 
volumes as that recently compiled by Dr. Foakes Jackson, entitled 
"The Faith and the War," a volume in which the curious reader may 
contemplate deans and canons, divines and church dignitaries, men 
intelligent and enquiring and religiously disposed, all lying like 
overladen camels, panting under this load of obsolete theological 
responsibility, groaning great articles, outside the needle's eye 
that leads to God.



6. THE COMING OF GOD


Modern religion bases its knowledge of God and its account of God 
entirely upon experience.  It has encountered God.  It does not 
argue about God; it relates.  It relates without any of those 
wrappings of awe and reverence that fold so necessarily about 
imposture, it relates as one tells of a friend and his assistance, 
of a happy adventure, of a beautiful thing found and picked up by 
the wayside.

So far as its psychological phases go the new account of personal 
salvation tallies very closely with the account of "conversion" as 
it is given by other religions.  It has little to tell that is not 
already familiar to the reader of William James's "Varieties of 
Religious Experience."  It describes an initial state of distress 
with the aimlessness and cruelties of life, and particularly with 
the futility of the individual life, a state of helpless self-
disgust, of inability to form any satisfactory plan of living.  This 
is the common prelude known to many sorts of Christian as 
"conviction of sin"; it is, at any rate, a conviction of hopeless 
confusion. . . .  Then in some way the idea of God comes into the 
distressed mind, at first simply as an idea, without substance or 
belief.  It is read about or it is remembered; it is expounded by 
some teacher or some happy convert.  In the case of all those of the 
new faith with whose personal experience I have any intimacy, the 
idea of God has remained for some time simply as an idea floating 
about in a mind still dissatisfied.  God is not believed in, but it 
is realised that if there were such a being he would supply the 
needed consolation and direction, his continuing purpose would knit 
together the scattered effort of life, his immortality would take 
the sting from death.  Under this realisation the idea is pursued 
and elaborated.  For a time there is a curious resistance to the 
suggestion that God is truly a person; he is spoken of preferably by 
such phrases as the Purpose in Things, as the Racial Consciousness, 
as the Collective Mind.

I believe that this resistance in so many contemporary minds to the 
idea of God as a person is due very largely to the enormous 
prejudice against divine personality created by the absurdities of 
the Christian teaching and the habitual monopoly of the Christian 
idea.  The picture of Christ as the Good Shepherd thrusts itself 
before minds unaccustomed to the idea that they are lambs.  The 
cross in the twilight bars the way.  It is a novelty and an enormous 
relief to such people to realise that one may think of God without 
being committed to think of either the Father, the Son, or the Holy 
Ghost, or of all of them at once.  That freedom had not seemed 
possible to them.  They had been hypnotised and obsessed by the idea 
that the Christian God is the only thinkable God.  They had heard so 
much about that God and so little of any other.  With that release 
their minds become, as it were, nascent and ready for the coming of 
God.

Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own time, God comes.  This 
cardinal experience is an undoubting, immediate sense of God.  It is 
the attainment of an absolute certainty that one is not alone in 
oneself.  It is as if one was touched at every point by a being akin 
to oneself, sympathetic, beyond measure wiser, steadfast and pure in 
aim.  It is completer and more intimate, but it is like standing 
side by side with and touching someone that we love very dearly and 
trust completely.  It is as if this being bridged a thousand 
misunderstandings and brought us into fellowship with a great 
multitude of other people. . . .

"Closer he is than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."

The moment may come while we are alone in the darkness, under the 
stars, or while we walk by ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit 
and muse.  It may come upon the sinking ship or in the tumult of the 
battle.  There is no saying when it may not come to us. . . .  But 
after it has come our lives are changed, God is with us and there is 
no more doubt of God.  Thereafter one goes about the world like one 
who was lonely and has found a lover, like one who was perplexed and 
has found a solution.  One is assured that there is a Power that 
fights with us against the confusion and evil within us and without.  
There comes into the heart an essential and enduring happiness and 
courage.

There is but one God, there is but one true religious experience, 
but under a multitude of names, under veils and darknesses, God has 
in this manner come into countless lives.  There is scarcely a 
faith, however mean and preposterous, that has not been a way to 
holiness.  God who is himself finite, who himself struggles in his 
great effort from strength to strength, has no spite against error.  
Far beyond halfway he hastens to meet the purblind.  But God is 
against the darkness in their eyes.  The faith which is returning to 
men girds at veils and shadows, and would see God plainly.  It has 
little respect for mysteries.  It rends the veil of the temple in 
rags and tatters.  It has no superstitious fear of this huge 
friendliness, of this great brother and leader of our little beings.  
To find God is but the beginning of wisdom, because then for all our 
days we have to learn his purpose with us and to live our lives with 
him.



CHAPTER THE SECOND

HERESIES; OR THE THINGS THAT GOD IS NOT


1. HERESIES ARE MISCONCEPTIONS OF GOD


Religion is not a plant that has grown from one seed; it is like a 
lake that has been fed by countless springs.  It is a great pool of 
living water, mingled from many sources and tainted with much 
impurity.  It is synthetic in its nature; it becomes simpler from 
original complexities; the sediment subsides.

A life perfectly adjusted to its surroundings is a life without 
mentality; no judgment is called for, no inhibition, no disturbance 
of the instinctive flow of perfect reactions.  Such a life is bliss, 
or nirvana.  It is unconsciousness below dreaming.  Consciousness is 
discord evoking the will to adjust; it is inseparable from need.  At 
every need consciousness breaks into being.  Imperfect adjustments, 
needs, are the rents and tatters in the smooth dark veil of being 
through which the light of consciousness shines--the light of 
consciousness and will of which God is the sun.

So that every need of human life, every disappointment and 
dissatisfaction and call for help and effort, is a means whereby men 
may and do come to the realisation of God.

There is no cardinal need, there is no sort of experience in human 
life from which there does not come or has not come a contribution 
to men's religious ideas.  At every challenge men have to put forth 
effort, feel doubt of adequacy, be thwarted, perceive the chill 
shadow of their mortality.  At every challenge comes the possibility 
of help from without, the idea of eluding frustration, the 
aspiration towards immortality.  It is possible to classify the 
appeals men make for God under the headings of their chief system of 
effort, their efforts to understand, their fear and their struggles 
for safety and happiness, the craving of their restlessness for 
peace, their angers against disorder and their desire for the 
avenger; their sexual passions and perplexities. . . .

Each of these great systems of needs and efforts brings its own sort 
of sediment into religion.  Each, that is to say, has its own kind 
of heresy, its distinctive misapprehension of God.  It is only in 
the synthesis and mutual correction of many divergent ideas that the 
idea of God grows clear.  The effort to understand completely, for 
example, leads to the endless Heresies of Theory.  Men trip over the 
inherent infirmities of the human mind.  But in these days one does 
not argue greatly about dogma.  Almost every conceivable error about 
unity, about personality, about time and quantity and genus and 
species, about begetting and beginning and limitation and similarity 
and every kink in the difficult mind of man, has been thrust forward 
in some form of dogma.  Beside the errors of thought are the errors 
of emotion.  Fear and feebleness go straight to the Heresies that 
God is Magic or that God is Providence; restless egotism at leisure 
and unchallenged by urgent elementary realities breeds the Heresies 
of Mysticism, anger and hate call for God's Judgments, and the 
stormy emotions of sex gave mankind the Phallic God.  Those who find 
themselves possessed by the new spirit in religion, realise very 
speedily the necessity of clearing the mind of all these 
exaggerations, transferences, and overflows of feeling.  The search 
for divine truth is like gold washing; nothing is of any value until 
most has been swept away.



2. HERESIES OF SPECULATION


One sort of heresies stands apart from the rest.  It is infinitely 
the most various sort.  It includes all those heresies which result 
from wrong-headed mental elaboration, as distinguished from those 
which are the result of hasty and imperfect apprehension, the 
heresies of the clever rather than the heresies of the obtuse.  The 
former are of endless variety and complexity; the latter are in 
comparison natural, simple confusions.  The former are the errors of 
the study, the latter the superstitions that spring by the wayside, 
or are brought down to us in our social structure out of a barbaric 
past.

To the heresies of thought and speculation belong the elaborate 
doctrine of the Trinity, dogmas about God's absolute qualities, such 
odd deductions as the accepted Christian teachings about the 
virginity of Mary and Joseph, and the like.  All these things are 
parts of orthodox Christianity.  Yet none of them did Christ, even 
by the Christian account, expound or recommend.  He treated them as 
negligible.  It was left for the Alexandrians, for Alexander, for 
little, red-haired, busy, wire-pulling Athanasius to find out 
exactly what their Master was driving at, three centuries after 
their Master was dead. . . .

Men still sit at little desks remote from God or life, and rack 
their inadequate brains to meet fancied difficulties and state 
unnecessary perfections.  They seek God by logic, ignoring the 
marginal error that creeps into every syllogism.  Their conceit 
blinds them to the limitations upon their thinking.  They weave 
spider-like webs of muddle and disputation across the path by which 
men come to God.  It would not matter very much if it were not that 
simpler souls are caught in these webs.  Every great religious 
system in the world is choked by such webs; each system has its own.  
Of all the blood-stained tangled heresies which make up doctrinal 
Christianity and imprison the mind of the western world to-day, not 
one seems to have been known to the nominal founder of Christianity.  
Jesus Christ never certainly claimed to be the Messiah; never spoke 
clearly of the Trinity; was vague upon the scheme of salvation and 
the significance of his martyrdom.  We are asked to suppose that he 
left his apostles without instructions, that were necessary to their 
eternal happiness, that he could give them the Lord's Prayer but 
leave them to guess at the all-important Creed,* and that the Church 
staggered along blindly, putting its foot in and out of damnation, 
until the "experts" of Nicaea, that "garland of priests," marshalled 
by Constantine's officials, came to its rescue. . . .  From the 
conversion of Paul onward, the heresies of the intellect multiplied 
about Christ's memory and hid him from the sight of men.  We are no 
longer clear about the doctrine he taught nor about the things he 
said and did. . . .

* Even the "Apostles' Creed" is not traceable earlier than the 
fourth century.  It is manifestly an old, patched formulary.  
Rutinius explains that it was not written down for a long time, but 
transmitted orally, kept secret, and used as a sort of password 
among the elect.

We are all so weary of this theology of the Christians, we are all 
at heart so sceptical about their Triune God, that it is needless 
here to spend any time or space upon the twenty thousand different 
formulae in which the orthodox have attempted to believe in 
something of the sort.  There are several useful encyclopaedias of 
sects and heresies, compact, but still bulky, to which the curious 
may go.  There are ten thousand different expositions of orthodoxy.  
No one who really seeks God thinks of the Trinity, either the 
Trinity of the Trinitarian or the Trinity of the Sabellian or the 
Trinity of the Arian, any more than one thinks of those theories 
made stone, those gods with three heads and seven hands, who sit on 
lotus leaves and flourish lingams and what not, in the temples of 
India.  Let us leave, therefore, these morbid elaborations of the 
human intelligence to drift to limbo, and come rather to the natural 
heresies that spring from fundamental weaknesses of the human 
character, and which are common to all religions.  Against these it 
is necessary to keep constant watch.  They return very insidiously.



3. GOD IS NOT MAGIC


One of the most universal of these natural misconceptions of God is 
to consider him as something magic serving the ends of men.

It is not easy for us to grasp at first the full meaning of giving 
our souls to God.  The missionary and teacher of any creed is all 
too apt to hawk God for what he will fetch; he is greedy for the 
poor triumph of acquiescence; and so it comes about that many people 
who have been led to believe themselves religious, are in reality 
still keeping back their own souls and trying to use God for their 
own purposes.  God is nothing more for them as yet than a 
magnificent Fetish.  They did not really want him, but they have 
heard that he is potent stuff; their unripe souls think to make use 
of him.  They call upon his name, they do certain things that are 
supposed to be peculiarly influential with him, such as saying 
prayers and repeating gross praises of him, or reading in a blind, 
industrious way that strange miscellany of Jewish and early 
Christian literature, the Bible, and suchlike mental mortification, 
or making the Sabbath dull and uncomfortable.  In return for these 
fetishistic propitiations God is supposed to interfere with the 
normal course of causation in their favour.  He becomes a celestial 
log-roller.  He remedies unfavourable accidents, cures petty 
ailments, contrives unexpected gifts of medicine, money, or the 
like, he averts bankruptcies, arranges profitable transactions, and 
does a thousand such services for his little clique of faithful 
people.  The pious are represented as being constantly delighted by 
these little surprises, these bouquets and chocolate boxes from the 
divinity.  Or contrawise he contrives spiteful turns for those who 
fail in their religious attentions.  He murders Sabbath-breaking 
children, or disorganises the careful business schemes of the 
ungodly.  He is represented as going Sabbath-breakering on Sunday 
morning as a Staffordshire worker goes ratting.  Ordinary everyday 
Christianity is saturated with this fetishistic conception of God.  
It may be disowned in THE HIBBERT JOURNAL, but it is unblushingly 
advocated in the parish magazine.  It is an idea taken over by 
Christianity with the rest of the qualities of the Hebrew God.  It 
is natural enough in minds so self-centred that their recognition of 
weakness and need brings with it no real self-surrender, but it is 
entirely inconsistent with the modern conception of the true God.

There has dropped upon the table as I write a modest periodical 
called THE NORTHERN BRITISH ISRAEL REVIEW, illustrated with 
portraits of various clergymen of the Church of England, and of 
ladies and gentlemen who belong to the little school of thought 
which this magazine represents; it is, I should judge, a sub-sect 
entirely within the Established Church of England, that is to say 
within the Anglican communion of the Trinitarian Christians.  It 
contains among other papers a very entertaining summary by a 
gentleman entitled--I cite the unusual title-page of the periodical--
"Landseer Mackenzie, Esq.," of the views of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and 
Obadiah upon the Kaiser William.  They are distinctly hostile views.  
Mr. Landseer Mackenzie discourses not only upon these anticipatory 
condemnations but also upon the relations of the weather to this 
war.  He is convinced quite simply and honestly that God has been 
persistently rigging the weather against the Germans.  He points out 
that the absence of mist on the North Sea was of great help to the 
British in the autumn of 1914, and declares that it was the wet 
state of the country that really held up the Germans in Flanders in 
the winter of 1914-15.  He ignores the part played by the weather in 
delaying the relief of Kut-el-Amara, and he has not thought of the 
difficult question why the Deity, having once decided upon 
intervention, did not, instead of this comparatively trivial 
meteorological assistance, adopt the more effective course of, for 
example, exploding or spoiling the German stores of ammunition by 
some simple atomic miracle, or misdirecting their gunfire by a 
sudden local modification of the laws of refraction or gravitation.

Since these views of God come from Anglican vicarages I can only 
conclude that this kind of belief is quite orthodox and permissible 
in the established church, and that I am charging orthodox 
Christianity here with nothing that has ever been officially 
repudiated.  I find indeed the essential assumptions of Mr. Landseer 
Mackenzie repeated in endless official Christian utterances on the 
part of German and British and Russian divines.  The Bishop of 
Chelmsford, for example, has recently ascribed our difficulties in 
the war to our impatience with long sermons--among other similar 
causes.  Such Christians are manifestly convinced that God can be 
invoked by ritual--for example by special days of national prayer or 
an increased observance of Sunday--or made malignant by neglect or 
levity.  It is almost fundamental in their idea of him.  The 
ordinary Mohammedan seems as confident of this magic pettiness of 
God, and the belief of China in the magic propitiations and 
resentments of "Heaven" is at least equally strong.

But the true God as those of the new religion know him is no such 
God of luck and intervention.  He is not to serve men's ends or the 
ends of nations or associations of men; he is careless of our 
ceremonies and invocations.  He does not lose his temper with our 
follies and weaknesses.  It is for us to serve Him.  He captains us, 
he does not coddle us.  He has his own ends for which he needs 
us. . . .



4. GOD IS NOT PROVIDENCE


Closely related to this heresy that God is magic, is the heresy that 
calls him Providence, that declares the apparent adequacy of cause 
and effect to be a sham, and that all the time, incalculably, he is 
pulling about the order of events for our personal advantages.

The idea of Providence was very gaily travested by Daudet in 
"Tartarin in the Alps."  You will remember how Tartarin's friend 
assured him that all Switzerland was one great Trust, intent upon 
attracting tourists and far too wise and kind to permit them to 
venture into real danger, that all the precipices were netted 
invisibly, and all the loose rocks guarded against falling, that 
avalanches were prearranged spectacles and the crevasses at their 
worst slippery ways down into kindly catchment bags.  If the 
mountaineer tried to get into real danger he was turned back by 
specious excuses.  Inspired by this persuasion Tartarin behaved with 
incredible daring. . . .  That is exactly the Providence theory of 
the whole world.  There can be no doubt that it does enable many a 
timid soul to get through life with a certain recklessness.  And 
provided there is no slip into a crevasse, the Providence theory 
works well.  It would work altogether well if there were no 
crevasses.

Tartarin was reckless because of his faith in Providence, and 
escaped.  But what would have happened to him if he had fallen into 
a crevasse?

There exists a very touching and remarkable book by Sir Francis 
Younghusband called "Within." [Williams and Norgate, 1912.]  It is 
the confession of a man who lived with a complete confidence in 
Providence until he was already well advanced in years.  He went 
through battles and campaigns, he filled positions of great honour 
and responsibility, he saw much of the life of men, without 
altogether losing his faith.  The loss of a child, an Indian famine, 
could shake it but not overthrow it.  Then coming back one day from 
some races in France, he was knocked down by an automobile and hurt 
very cruelly.  He suffered terribly in body and mind.  His 
sufferings caused much suffering to others.  He did his utmost to 
see the hand of a loving Providence in his and their disaster and 
the torment it inflicted, and being a man of sterling honesty and a 
fine essential simplicity of mind, he confessed at last that he 
could not do so.  His confidence in the benevolent intervention of 
God was altogether destroyed.  His book tells of this shattering, 
and how labouriously he reconstructed his religion upon less 
confident lines.  It is a book typical of an age and of a very 
English sort of mind, a book well worth reading.

That he came to a full sense of the true God cannot be asserted, but 
how near he came to God, let one quotation witness.


"The existence of an outside Providence," he writes, "who created 
us, who watches over us, and who guides our lives like a Merciful 
Father, we have found impossible longer to believe in.  But of the 
existence of a Holy Spirit radiating upward through all animate 
beings, and finding its fullest expression, in man in love, and in 
the flowers in beauty, we can be as certain as of anything in the 
world.  This fiery spiritual impulsion at the centre and the source 
of things, ever burning in us, is the supremely important factor in 
our existence.  It does not always attain to light.  In many 
directions it fails; the conditions are too hard and it is utterly 
blocked.  In others it only partially succeeds.  But in a few it 
bursts forth into radiant light.  There are few who in some heavenly 
moment of their lives have not been conscious of its presence.  We 
may not be able to give it outward expression, but we know that it 
is there." . . .


God does not guide our feet.  He is no sedulous governess 
restraining and correcting the wayward steps of men.  If you would 
fly into the air, there is no God to bank your aeroplane correctly 
for you or keep an ill-tended engine going; if you would cross a 
glacier, no God nor angel guides your steps amidst the slippery 
places.  He will not even mind your innocent children for you if you 
leave them before an unguarded fire.  Cherish no delusions; for 
yourself and others you challenge danger and chance on your own 
strength; no talisman, no God, can help you or those you care for.  
Nothing of such things will God do; it is an idle dream.  But God 
will be with you nevertheless.  In the reeling aeroplane or the dark 
ice-cave God will be your courage.  Though you suffer or are killed, 
it is not an end.  He will be with you as you face death; he will 
die with you as he has died already countless myriads of brave 
deaths.  He will come so close to you that at the last you will not 
know whether it is you or he who dies, and the present death will be 
swallowed up in his victory.


5. THE HERESY OF QUIETISM


God comes to us within and takes us for his own.  He releases us 
from ourselves; he incorporates us with his own undying experience 
and adventure; he receives us and gives himself.  He is a stimulant; 
he makes us live immortally and more abundantly.  I have compared 
him to the sensation of a dear, strong friend who comes and stands 
quietly beside one, shoulder to shoulder.

The finding of God is the beginning of service.  It is not an escape 
from life and action; it is the release of life and action from the 
prison of the mortal self.  Not to realise that, is the heresy of 
Quietism, of many mystics.  Commonly such people are people of some 
wealth, able to command services for all their everyday needs.  They 
make religion a method of indolence.  They turn their backs on the 
toil and stresses of existence and give themselves up to a delicious 
reverie in which they flirt with the divinity.  They will recount 
their privileges and ecstasies, and how ingeniously and wonderfully 
God has tried and proved them.  But indeed the true God was not the 
lover of Madame Guyon.  The true God is not a spiritual troubadour 
wooing the hearts of men and women to no purpose.  The true God goes 
through the world like fifes and drums and flags, calling for 
recruits along the street.  We must go out to him.  We must accept 
his discipline and fight his battle.  The peace of God comes not by 
thinking about it but by forgetting oneself in him.



6. GOD DOES NOT PUNISH


Man is a social animal, and there is in him a great faculty for 
moral indignation.  Many of the early Gods were mainly Gods of Fear.  
They were more often "wrath" than not.  Such was the temperament of 
the Semitic deity who, as the Hebrew Jehovah, proliferated, perhaps 
under the influence of the Alexandrian Serapeum, into the Christian 
Trinity and who became also the Moslem God.*  The natural hatred of 
unregenerate men against everything that is unlike themselves, 
against strange people and cheerful people, against unfamiliar 
usages and things they do not understand, embodied itself in this 
conception of a malignant and partisan Deity, perpetually "upset" by 
the little things people did, and contriving murder and vengeance.  
Now this God would be drowning everybody in the world, now he would 
be burning Sodom and Gomorrah, now he would be inciting his 
congenial Israelites to the most terrific pogroms.  This divine 
"frightfulness" is of course the natural human dislike and distrust 
for queer practices or for too sunny a carelessness, a dislike 
reinforced by the latent fierceness of the ape in us, liberating the 
latent fierceness of the ape in us, giving it an excuse and pressing 
permission upon it, handing the thing hated and feared over to its 
secular arm. . . .

* It is not so generally understood as it should be among English 
and American readers that a very large proportion of early 
Christians before the creeds established and regularised the 
doctrine of the Trinity, denied absolutely that Jehovah was God; 
they regarded Christ as a rebel against Jehovah and a rescuer of 
humanity from him, just as Prometheus was a rebel against Jove.  
These beliefs survived for a thousand years tbroughout Christendom: 
they were held by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the 
Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians.  The catholic 
church found it necessary to prohibit the circulation of the Old 
Testament among laymen very largely on account of the polemics of 
the Cathars against the Hebrew God.  But in this book, be it noted, 
the word Christian, when it is not otherwise defined, is used to 
indicate only the Trinitarians who accept the official creeds.

It is a human paradox that the desire for seemliness, the instinct 
for restraints and fair disciplines, and the impulse to cherish 
sweet familiar things, that these things of the True God should so 
readily liberate cruelty and tyranny.  It is like a woman going with 
a light to tend and protect her sleeping child, and setting the 
house on fire.  None the less, right down to to-day, the heresy of 
God the Revengeful, God the Persecutor and Avenger, haunts religion.  
It is only in quite recent years that the growing gentleness of 
everyday life has begun to make men a little ashamed of a Deity less 
tolerant and gentle than themselves.  The recent literature of the 
Anglicans abounds in the evidence of this trouble.

Bishop Colenso of Natal was prosecuted and condemned in 1863 for 
denying the irascibility of his God and teaching "the Kaffirs of 
Natal" the dangerous heresy that God is all mercy.  "We cannot allow 
it to be said," the Dean of Cape Town insisted, "that God was not 
angry and was not appeased by punishment." He was angry "on account 
of Sin, which is a great evil and a great insult to His Majesty."  
The case of the Rev. Charles Voysey, which occurred in 1870, was a 
second assertion of the Church's insistence upon the fierceness of 
her God.  This case is not to be found in the ordinary church 
histories nor is it even mentioned in the latest edition of the 
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA; nevertheless it appears to have been a 
very illuminating case.  It is doubtful if the church would 
prosecute or condemn either Bishop Colenso or Mr. Voysey to-day.



7. GOD AND THE NURSERY-MAID


Closely related to the Heresy of God the Avenger, is that kind of 
miniature God the Avenger, to whom the nursery-maid and the 
overtaxed parent are so apt to appeal.  You stab your children with 
such a God and he poisons all their lives.  For many of us the word 
"God" first came into our lives to denote a wanton, irrational 
restraint, as Bogey, as the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye.  
God Bogey is a great convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to 
leave Fear to mind her charges and enforce her disciplines, while 
she goes off upon her own aims.  But indeed, the teaching of God 
Bogey is an outrage upon the soul of a child scarcely less dreadful 
than an indecent assault.  The reason rebels and is crushed under 
this horrible and pursuing suggestion.  Many minds never rise again 
from their injury.  They remain for the rest of life spiritually 
crippled and debased, haunted by a fear, stained with a persuasion 
of relentless cruelty in the ultimate cause of all things.

I, who write, was so set against God, thus rendered.  He and his 
Hell were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I still 
believed in him, and who could help but hate?  I thought of him as a 
fantastic monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening, 
perpetually waiting to condemn and to "strike me dead"; his flames 
as ready as a grill-room fire.  He was over me and about my 
feebleness and silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would 
be about a child drowning in mid-Atlantic.  When I was still only a 
child of thirteen, by the grace of the true God in me, I flung this 
Lie out of my mind, and for many years, until I came to see that God 
himself had done this thing for me, the name of God meant nothing to 
me but the hideous scar in my heart where a fearful demon had been.

I see about me to-day many dreadful moral and mental cripples with 
this bogey God of the nursery-maid, with his black, insane revenges, 
still living like a horrible parasite in their hearts in the place 
where God should be.  They are afraid, afraid, afraid; they dare not 
be kindly to formal sinners, they dare not abandon a hundred foolish 
observances; they dare not look at the causes of things.  They are 
afraid of sunshine, of nakedness, of health, of adventure, of 
science, lest that old watching spider take offence.  The voice of 
the true God whispers in their hearts, echoes in speech and writing, 
but they avert themselves, fear-driven.  For the true God has no 
lash of fear.  And how the foul-minded bigot, with his ill-shaven 
face, his greasy skin, his thick, gesticulating hands, his 
bellowings and threatenings, loves to reap this harvest of fear the 
ignorant cunning of the nursery girl has sown for him!  How he loves 
the importance of denunciation, and, himself a malignant cripple, to 
rally the company of these crippled souls to persecute and destroy 
the happy children of God! . . .

Christian priestcraft turns a dreadful face to children.  There is a 
real wickedness of the priest that is different from other 
wickedness, and that affects a reasonable mind just as cruelty and 
strange perversions of instinct affect it.  Let a former Archbishop 
of Canterbury speak for me.  This that follows is the account given 
by Archbishop Tait in a debate in the Upper House of Convocation 
(July 3rd, 1877) of one of the publications of a certain SOCIETY OF 
THE HOLY CROSS:


"I take this book, as its contents show, to be meant for the 
instruction of very young children.  I find, in one of the pages of 
it, the statement that between the ages of six and six and a half 
years would be the proper time for the inculcation of the teaching 
which is to be found in the book.  Now, six to six and a half is 
certainly a very tender age, and to these children I find these 
statements addressed in the book:


"'It is to the priest, and to the priest only, that the child must 
acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him.'


"I hope and trust the person, the three clergymen, or however many 
there were, did not exactly realise what they were writing; that 
they did not mean to say that a child was not to confess its sins to 
God direct; that it was not to confess its sins, at the age of six, 
to its mother, or to its father, but was only to have recourse to 
the priest.  But the words, to say the least of them, are rash.  
Then comes the very obvious question:


"'Do you know why?  It is because God, when he was on earth, gave to 
his priests, and to them alone, the Divine Power of forgiving men 
their sins.  It was to priests alone that Jesus said: "Receive ye 
the Holy Ghost." . . .  Those who will not confess will not be 
cured.  Sin is a terrible sickness, and casts souls into hell.'


"That is addressed to a child six years of age.


"'I have known,' the book continues, 'poor children who concealed 
their sins in confession for years; they were very unhappy, were 
tormented with remorse, and if they had died in that state they 
would certainly have gone to the everlasting fires of hell.'" . . .


Now here is something against nature, something that I have seen 
time after time in the faces and bearing of priests and heard in 
their preaching.  It is a distinct lust.  Much nobility and devotion 
there are among priests, saintly lives and kindly lives, lives of 
real worship, lives no man may better; this that I write is not of 
all, perhaps not of many priests.  But there has been in all ages 
that have known sacerdotalism this terrible type of the priest; 
priestcraft and priestly power release an aggressive and narrow 
disposition to a recklessness of suffering and a hatred of liberty 
that surely exceeds the badness of any other sort of men.



8. THE CHILDREN'S GOD


Children do not naturally love God.  They have no great capacity for 
an idea so subtle and mature as the idea of God.  While they are 
still children in a home and cared for, life is too kind and easy 
for them to feel any great need of God.  All things are still 
something God-like. . . .

The true God, our modern minds insist upon believing, can have no 
appetite for unnatural praise and adoration.  He does not clamour 
for the attention of children.  He is not like one of those senile 
uncles who dream of glory in the nursery, who love to hear it said, 
"The children adore him."  If children are loved and trained to 
truth, justice, and mutual forbearance, they will be ready for the 
true God as their needs bring them within his scope.  They should be 
left to their innocence, and to their trust in the innocence of the 
world, as long as they can be.  They should be told only of God as a 
Great Friend whom some day they will need more and understand and 
know better.  That is as much as most children need.  The phrases of 
religion put too early into their mouths may become a cant, 
something worse than blasphemy.

Yet children are sometimes very near to God.  Creative passion stirs 
in their play.  At times they display a divine simplicity.  But it 
does not follow that therefore they should be afflicted with 
theological formulae or inducted into ceremonies and rites that they 
may dislike or misinterpret.  If by any accident, by the death of a 
friend or a distressing story, the thought of death afflicts a 
child, then he may begin to hear of God, who takes those that serve 
him out of their slain bodies into his shining immortality.  Or if 
by some menial treachery, through some prowling priest, the whisper 
of Old Bogey reaches our children, then we may set their minds at 
ease by the assurance of his limitless charity. . . .

With adolescence comes the desire for God and to know more of God, 
and that is the most suitable time for religious talk and teaching.



9. GOD IS NOT SEXUAL


In the last two or three hundred years there has been a very 
considerable disentanglement of the idea of God from the complex of 
sexual thought and feeling.  But in the early days of religion the 
two things were inseparably bound together; the fury of the Hebrew 
prophets, for example, is continually proclaiming the extraordinary 
"wrath" of their God at this or that little dirtiness or 
irregularity or breach of the sexual tabus.  The ceremony of 
circumcision is clearly indicative of the original nature of the 
Semitic deity who developed into the Trinitarian God.  So far as 
Christianity dropped this rite, so far Christianity disavowed the 
old associations.  But to this day the representative Christian 
churches still make marriage into a mystical sacrament, and, with 
some exceptions, the Roman communion exacts the sacrifice of 
celibacy from its priesthood, regardless of the mischievousness and 
maliciousness that so often ensue.  Nearly every Christian church 
inflicts as much discredit and injustice as it can contrive upon the 
illegitimate child.  They do not treat illegitimate children as 
unfortunate children, but as children with a mystical and an 
incurable taint of SIN.  Kindly easy-going Christians may resent 
this statement because it does not tally with their own attitudes, 
but let them consult their orthodox authorities.

One must distinguish clearly here between what is held to be sacred 
or sinful in itself and what is held to be one's duty or a nation's 
duty because it is in itself the wisest, cleanest, clearest, best 
thing to do.  By the latter tests and reasonable arguments most or 
all of our institutions regulating the relations of the sexes may be 
justifiable.  But my case is not whether they can be justified by 
these tests but that it is not by these tests that they are judged 
even to-day, by the professors of the chief religions of the world.  
It is the temper and not the conclusions of the religious bodies 
that I would criticise.  These sexual questions are guarded by a 
holy irascibility, and the most violent efforts are made--with a 
sense of complete righteousness--to prohibit their discussion.  That 
fury about sexual things is only to be explained on the hypothesis 
that the Christian God remains a sex God in the minds of great 
numbers of his exponents.  His disentanglement from that plexus is 
incomplete.  Sexual things are still to the orthodox Christian, 
sacred things.

Now the God whom those of the new faith are finding is only 
mediately concerned with the relations of men and women.  He is no 
more sexual essentially than he is essentially dietetic or hygienic.  
The God of Leviticus was all these things.  He is represented as 
prescribing the most petty and intimate of observances--many of 
which are now habitually disregarded by the Christians who profess 
him. . . .  It is part of the evolution of the idea of God that we 
have now so largely disentangled our conception of him from the 
dietary and regimen and meticulous sexual rules that were once 
inseparably bound up with his majesty.  Christ himself was one of 
the chief forces in this disentanglement, there is the clearest 
evidence in several instances of his disregard of the rule and his 
insistence that his disciples should seek for the spirit underlying 
and often masked by the rule.  His Church, being made of baser 
matter, has followed him as reluctantly as possible and no further 
than it was obliged.  But it has followed him far enough to admit 
his principle that in all these matters there is no need for 
superstitious fear, that the interpretation of the divine purpose is 
left to the unembarrassed intelligence of men.  The church has 
followed him far enough to make the harsh threatenings of priests 
and ecclesiastics against what they are pleased to consider impurity 
or sexual impiety, a profound inconsistency.  One seems to hear 
their distant protests when one reads of Christ and the Magdalen, or 
of Christ eating with publicans and sinners.  The clergy of our own 
days play the part of the New Testament Pharisees with the utmost 
exactness and complete unconsciousness.  One cannot imagine a modern 
ecclesiastic conversing with a Magdalen in terms of ordinary 
civility, unless she was in a very high social position indeed, or 
blending with disreputable characters without a dramatic sense of 
condescension and much explanatory by-play.  Those who profess 
modern religion do but follow in these matters a course entirely 
compatible with what has survived of the authentic teachings of 
Christ, when they declare that God is not sexual, and that religious 
passion and insult and persecution upon the score of sexual things 
are a barbaric inheritance.

But lest anyone should fling off here with some hasty assumption 
that those who profess the religion of the true God are sexually 
anarchistic, let stress be laid at once upon the opening sentence of 
the preceding paragraph, and let me a little anticipate a section 
which follows.  We would free men and women from exact and 
superstitious rules and observances, not to make them less the 
instruments of God but more wholly his.  The claim of modern 
religion is that one should give oneself unreservedly to God, that 
there is no other salvation.  The believer owes all his being and 
every moment of his life to God, to keep mind and body as clean, 
fine, wholesome, active and completely at God's service as he can.  
There is no scope for indulgence or dissipation in such a 
consecrated life.  It is a matter between the individual and his 
conscience or his doctor or his social understanding what exactly he 
may do or not do, what he may eat or drink or so forth, upon any 
occasion.  Nothing can exonerate him from doing his utmost to 
determine and perform the right act.  Nothing can excuse his failure 
to do so.  But what is here being insisted upon is that none of 
these things has immediately to do with God or religious emotion, 
except only the general will to do right in God's service.  The 
detailed interpretation of that "right" is for the dispassionate 
consideration of the human intelligence.

All this is set down here as distinctly as possible.  Because of the 
emotional reservoirs of sex, sexual dogmas are among the most 
obstinately recurrent of all heresies, and sexual excitement is 
always tending to leak back into religious feeling.  Amongst the 
sex-tormented priesthood of the Roman communion in particular, 
ignorant of the extreme practices of the Essenes and of the Orphic 
cult and suchlike predecessors of Christianity, there seems to be an 
extraordinary belief that chastity was not invented until 
Christianity came, and that the religious life is largely the 
propitiation of God by feats of sexual abstinence.  But a 
superstitious abstinence that scars and embitters the mind, distorts 
the imagination, makes the body gross and keeps it unclean, is just 
as offensive to God as any positive depravity.



CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE LIKENESS OF GOD


1. GOD IS COURAGE

Now having set down what those who profess the new religion regard 
as the chief misconceptions of God, having put these systems of 
ideas aside from our explanations, the path is cleared for the 
statement of what God is.  Since language springs entirely from 
material, spatial things, there is always an element of metaphor in 
theological statement.  So that I have not called this chapter the 
Nature of God, but the Likeness of God.

And firstly, GOD IS COURAGE.



2. GOD IS A PERSON


And next GOD IS A PERSON.

Upon this point those who are beginning to profess modern religion 
are very insistent.  It is, they declare, the central article, the 
axis, of their religion.  God is a person who can be known as one 
knows a friend, who can be served and who receives service, who 
partakes of our nature; who is, like us, a being in conflict with 
the unknown and the limitless and the forces of death; who values 
much that we value and is against much that we are pitted against.  
He is our king to whom we must be loyal; he is our captain, and to 
know him is to have a direction in our lives.  He feels us and knows 
us; he is helped and gladdened by us.  He hopes and attempts. . . .  
God is no abstraction nor trick of words, no Infinite.  He is as 
real as a bayonet thrust or an embrace.

Now this is where those who have left the old creeds and come asking 
about the new realisations find their chief difficulty.  They say, 
Show us this person; let us hear him.  (If they listen to the 
silences within, presently they will hear him.)  But when one 
argues, one finds oneself suddenly in the net of those ancient 
controversies between species and individual, between the one and 
the many, which arise out of the necessarily imperfect methods of 
the human mind.  Upon these matters there has been much pregnant 
writing during the last half century.  Such ideas as this writer has 
to offer are to be found in a previous little book of his, "First 
and Last Things," in which, writing as one without authority or 
specialisation in logic and philosophy, as an ordinary man vividly 
interested, for others in a like case, he was at some pains to 
elucidate the imperfections of this instrument of ours, this mind, 
by which we must seek and explain and reach up to God.  Suffice it 
here to say that theological discussion may very easily become like 
the vision of a man with cataract, a mere projection of inherent 
imperfections.  If we do not use our phraseology with a certain 
courage, and take that of those who are trying to convey their ideas 
to us with a certain politeness and charity, there is no end 
possible to any discussion in so subtle and intimate a matter as 
theology but assertions, denials, and wranglings.  And about this 
word "person" it is necessary to be as clear and explicit as 
possible, though perfect clearness, a definition of mathematical 
sharpness, is by the very nature of the case impossible.

Now when we speak of a person or an individual we think typically of 
a man, and we forget that he was once an embryo and will presently 
decay; we forget that he came of two people and may beget many, that 
he has forgotten much and will forget more, that he can be confused, 
divided against himself, delirious, drunken, drugged, or asleep.  On 
the contrary we are, in our hasty way of thinking of him, apt to 
suppose him continuous, definite, acting consistently and never 
forgetting.  But only abstract and theoretical persons are like 
that.  We couple with him the idea of a body.  Indeed, in the common 
use of the word "person" there is more thought of body than of mind.  
We speak of a lover possessing the person of his mistress.  We speak 
of offences against the person as opposed to insults, libels, or 
offences against property.  And the gods of primitive men and the 
earlier civilisations were quite of that quality of person.  They 
were thought of as living in very splendid bodies and as acting 
consistently.  If they were invisible in the ordinary world it was 
because they were aloof or because their "persons" were too splendid 
for weak human eyes.  Moses was permitted a mitigated view of the 
person of the Hebrew God on Mount Horeb; and Semele, who insisted 
upon seeing Zeus in the glories that were sacred to Juno, was 
utterly consumed.  The early Islamic conception of God, like the 
conception of most honest, simple Christians to-day, was clearly, in 
spite of the theologians, of a very exalted anthropomorphic 
personality away somewhere in Heaven.  The personal appearance of 
the Christian God is described in The Revelation, and however much 
that description may be explained away by commentators as 
symbolical, it is certainly taken by most straightforward believers 
as a statement of concrete reality.  Now if we are going to insist 
upon this primary meaning of person and individual, then certainly 
God as he is now conceived is not a person and not an individual.  
The true God will never promenade an Eden or a Heaven, nor sit upon 
a throne.

But current Christianity, modern developments of Islam, much Indian 
theological thought--that, for instance, which has found such 
delicate and attractive expression in the devotional poetry of 
Rabindranath Tagore--has long since abandoned this anthropomorphic 
insistence upon a body.  From the earliest ages man's mind has found 
little or no difficulty in the idea of something essential to the 
personality, a soul or a spirit or both, existing apart from the 
body and continuing after the destruction of the body, and being 
still a person and an individual.  From this it is a small step to 
the thought of a person existing independently of any existing or 
pre-existing body.  That is the idea of theological Christianity, as 
distinguished from the Christianity of simple faith.  The Triune 
Persons--omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent--exist for all 
time, superior to and independent of matter.  They are supremely 
disembodied.  One became incarnate--as a wind eddy might take up a 
whirl of dust. . . .  Those who profess modern religion conceive 
that this is an excessive abstraction of the idea of spirituality, a 
disembodiment of the idea of personality beyond the limits of the 
conceivable; nevertheless they accept the conception that a person, 
a spiritual individual, may be without an ordinary mortal body. . . .  
They declare that God is without any specific body, that he is 
immaterial, that he can affect the material universe--and that means 
that he can only reach our sight, our hearing, our touch--through 
the bodies of those who believe in him and serve him.

His nature is of the nature of thought and will.  Not only has he, 
in his essence, nothing to do with matter, but nothing to do with 
space.  He is not of matter nor of space.  He comes into them.  
Since the period when all the great theologies that prevail to-day 
were developed, there have been great changes in the ideas of men 
towards the dimensions of time and space.  We owe to Kant the 
release from the rule of these ideas as essential ideas.  Our modern 
psychology is alive to the possibility of Being that has no 
extension in space at all, even as our speculative geometry can 
entertain the possibility of dimensions--fourth, fifth, Nth 
dimensions--outside the three-dimensional universe of our 
experience.  And God being non-spatial is not thereby banished to an 
infinite remoteness, but brought nearer to us; he is everywhere 
immediately at hand, even as a fourth dimension would be everywhere 
immediately at hand.  He is a Being of the minds and in the minds of 
men.  He is in immediate contact with all who apprehend him. . . .

But modern religion declares that though he does not exist in matter 
or space, he exists in time just as a current of thought may do; 
that he changes and becomes more even as a man's purpose gathers 
itself together; that somewhere in the dawning of mankind he had a 
beginning, an awakening, and that as mankind grows he grows.  With 
our eyes he looks out upon the universe he invades; with our hands, 
he lays hands upon it.  All our truth, all our intentions and 
achievements, he gathers to himself.  He is the undying human 
memory, the increasing human will.

But this, you may object, is no more than saying that God is the 
collective mind and purpose of the human race.  You may declare that 
this is no God, but merely the sum of mankind.  But those who 
believe in the new ideas very steadfastly deny that.  God is, they 
say, not an aggregate but a synthesis.  He is not merely the best of 
all of us, but a Being in himself, composed of that but more than 
that, as a temple is more than a gathering of stones, or a regiment 
is more than an accumulation of men.  They point out that a man is 
made up of a great multitude of cells, each equivalent to a 
unicellular organism.  Not one of those cells is he, nor is he 
simply just the addition of all of them.  He is more than all of 
them.  You can take away these and these and these, and he still 
remains.  And he can detach part of himself and treat it as if it 
were not himself, just as a man may beat his breast or, as Cranmer 
the martyr did, thrust his hand into the flames.  A man is none the 
less himself because his hair is cut or his appendix removed or his 
leg amputated.

And take another image. . . .  Who bears affection for this or that 
spadeful of mud in my garden?  Who cares a throb of the heart for 
all the tons of chalk in Kent or all the lumps of limestone in 
Yorkshire?  But men love England, which is made up of such things.

And so we think of God as a synthetic reality, though he has neither 
body nor material parts.  And so too we may obey him and listen to 
him, though we think but lightly of the men whose hands or voices he 
sometimes uses.  And we may think of him as having moods and 
aspects--as a man has--and a consistency we call his character.

These are theorisings about God.  These are statements to convey 
this modern idea of God.  This, we say, is the nature of the person 
whose will and thoughts we serve.  No one, however, who understands 
the religious life seeks conversion by argument.  First one must 
feel the need of God, then one must form or receive an acceptable 
idea of God.  That much is no more than turning one's face to the 
east to see the coming of the sun.  One may still doubt if that 
direction is the east or whether the sun will rise.  The real coming 
of God is not that.  It is a change, an irradiation of the mind.  
Everything is there as it was before, only now it is aflame.  
Suddenly the light fills one's eyes, and one knows that God has 
risen and that doubt has fled for ever.


3. GOD IS YOUTH


The third thing to be told of the true God is that GOD IS YOUTH.

God, we hold, began and is always beginning.  He looks forever into 
the future.

Most of the old religions derive from a patriarchal phase.  God is 
in those systems the Ancient of Days.  I know of no Christian 
attempt to represent or symbolise God the Father which is not a 
bearded, aged man.  White hair, beard, bearing, wrinkles, a hundred 
such symptoms of senile decay are there.  These marks of senility do 
not astonish our modern minds in the picture of God, only because 
tradition and usage have blinded our eyes to the absurdity of a 
time-worn immortal.  Jove too and Wotan are figures far past the 
prime of their vigour.  These are gods after the ancient habit of 
the human mind, that turned perpetually backward for causes and 
reasons and saw all things to come as no more than the working out 
of Fate,--

     "Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
      Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
      Brought death into the world and all our woe."

But the God of this new age, we repeat, looks not to our past but 
our future, and if a figure may represent him it must be the figure 
of a beautiful youth, already brave and wise, but hardly come to his 
strength.  He should stand lightly on his feet in the morning time, 
eager to go forward, as though he had but newly arisen to a day that 
was still but a promise; he should bear a sword, that clean, 
discriminating weapon, his eyes should be as bright as swords; his 
lips should fall apart with eagerness for the great adventure before 
him, and he should be in very fresh and golden harness, reflecting 
the rising sun.  Death should still hang like mists and cloud banks 
and shadows in the valleys of the wide landscape about him.  There 
should be dew upon the threads of gossamer and little leaves and 
blades of the turf at his feet. . . .



4. WHEN WE SAY GOD IS LOVE


One of the sayings about God that have grown at the same time most 
trite and most sacred, is that God is Love.  This is a saying that 
deserves careful examination.  Love is a word very loosely used; 
there are people who will say they love new potatoes; there are a 
multitude of loves of different colours and values.  There is the 
love of a mother for her child, there is the love of brothers, there 
is the love of youth and maiden, and the love of husband and wife, 
there is illicit love and the love one bears one's home or one's 
country, there are dog-lovers and the loves of the Olympians, and 
love which is a passion of jealousy.  Love is frequently a mere 
blend of appetite and preference; it may be almost pure greed; it 
may have scarcely any devotion nor be a whit self-forgetful nor 
generous.  It is possible so to phrase things that the furtive 
craving of a man for another man's wife may be made out to be a 
light from God.  Yet about all the better sorts of love, the sorts 
of love that people will call "true love," there is something of 
that same exaltation out of the narrow self that is the essential 
quality of the knowledge of God.

Only while the exaltation of the love passion comes and goes, the 
exaltation of religious passion comes to remain.  Lovers are the 
windows by which we may look out of the prison of self, but God is 
the open door by which we freely go.  And God never dies, nor 
disappoints, nor betrays.

The love of a woman and a man has usually, and particularly in its 
earlier phases of excitement, far too much desire, far too much 
possessiveness and exclusiveness, far too much distrust or forced 
trust, and far too great a kindred with jealousy to be like the love 
of God.  The former is a dramatic relationship that drifts to a 
climax, and then again seeks presently a climax, and that may be 
satiated or fatigued.  But the latter is far more like the love of 
comrades, or like the love of a man and a woman who have loved and 
been through much trouble together, who have hurt one another and 
forgiven, and come to a complete and generous fellowship.  There is 
a strange and beautiful love that men tell of that will spring up on 
battlefields between sorely wounded men, and often they are men who 
have fought together, so that they will do almost incredibly brave 
and tender things for one another, though but recently they have 
been trying to kill each other.  There is often a pure exaltation of 
feeling between those who stand side by side manfully in any great 
stress.  These are the forms of love that perhaps come nearest to 
what we mean when we speak of the love of God.

That is man's love of God, but there is also something else; there 
is the love God bears for man in the individual believer.  Now this 
is not an indulgent, instinctive, and sacrificing love like the love 
of a woman for her baby.  It is the love of the captain for his men; 
God must love his followers as a great captain loves his men, who 
are so foolish, so helpless in themselves, so confiding, and yet 
whose faith alone makes him possible.  It is an austere love.  The 
spirit of God will not hesitate to send us to torment and bodily 
death. . . .

And God waits for us, for all of us who have the quality to reach 
him.  He has need of us as we of him.  He desires us and desires to 
make himself known to us.  When at last the individual breaks 
through the limiting darknesses to him, the irradiation of that 
moment, the smile and soul clasp, is in God as well as in man.  He 
has won us from his enemy.  We come staggering through into the 
golden light of his kingdom, to fight for his kingdom henceforth, 
until at last we are altogether taken up into his being.



CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS



1. THE SCIENTIFIC ATHEIST


It is a curious thing that while most organised religions seem to 
drape about and conceal and smother the statement of the true God, 
the honest Atheist, with his passionate impulse to strip the truth 
bare, is constantly and unwittingly reproducing the divine likeness.  
It will be interesting here to call a witness or so to the extreme 
instability of absolute negation.

Here, for example, is a deliverance from Professor Metchnikoff, who 
was a very typical antagonist of all religion.  He died only the 
other day.  He was a very great physiologist indeed; he was a man 
almost of the rank and quality of Pasteur or Charles Darwin.  A 
decade or more ago he wrote a book called "The Nature of Man," in 
which he set out very plainly a number of illuminating facts about 
life.  They are facts so illuminating that presently, in our 
discussion of sin, they will be referred to again.  But it is not 
Professor Metchnikoff's intention to provide material for a 
religious discussion.  He sets out his facts in order to overthrow 
theology as he conceives it.  The remarkable thing about his book, 
the thing upon which I would now lay stress, is that he betrays no 
inkling of the fact that he has no longer the right to conceive 
theology as he conceives it.  The development of his science has 
destroyed that right.

He does not realise how profoundly modern biology has affected our 
ideas of individuality and species, and how the import of theology 
is modified through these changes.  When he comes from his own world 
of modern biology to religion and philosophy he goes back in time.  
He attacks religion as he understood it when first he fell out with 
it fifty years or more ago.

Let us state as compactly as possible the nature of these changes 
that biological science has wrought almost imperceptibly in the 
general scheme and method of our thinking.

The influence of biology upon thought in general consists 
essentially in diminishing the importance of the individual and 
developing the realisation of the species, as if it were a kind of 
super-individual, a modifying and immortal super-individual, 
maintaining itself against the outer universe by the birth and death 
of its constituent individuals.  Natural History, which began by 
putting individuals into species as if the latter were mere 
classificatory divisions, has come to see that the species has its 
adventures, its history and drama, far exceeding in interest and 
importance the individual adventure.  "The Origin of Species" was 
for countless minds the discovery of a new romance in life.

The contrast of the individual life and this specific life may be 
stated plainly and compactly as follows.  A little while ago we 
current individuals, we who are alive now, were each of us 
distributed between two parents, then between four grandparents, and 
so on backward, we are temporarily assembled, as it were, out of an 
ancestral diffusion; we stand our trial, and presently our 
individuality is dispersed and mixed again with other 
individualities in an uncertain multitude of descendants.  But the 
species is not like this; it goes on steadily from newness to 
newness, remaining still a unity.  The drama of the individual life 
is a mere episode, beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing 
adventure of the species.  And Metchnikoff finds most of the trouble 
of life and the distresses of life in the fact that the species is 
still very painfully adjusting itself to the fluctuating conditions 
under which it lives.  The conflict of life is a continual pursuit 
of adjustment, and the "ills of life," of the individual life that 
is, are due to its "disharmonies."  Man, acutely aware of himself as 
an individual adventure and unawakened to himself as a species, 
finds life jangling and distressful, finds death frustration.  He 
fails and falls as a person in what may be the success and triumph 
of his kind.  He does not apprehend the struggle or the nature of 
victory, but only his own gravitation to death and personal 
extinction.

Now Professor Metchnikoff is anti-religious, and he is anti-
religious because to him as to so many Europeans religion is 
confused with priest-craft and dogmas, is associated with 
disagreeable early impressions of irrational repression and 
misguidance.  How completely he misconceives the quality of 
religion, how completely he sees it as an individual's affair, his 
own words may witness:


"Religion is still occupied with the problem of death.  The 
solutions which as yet it has offered cannot be regarded as 
satisfactory.  A future life has no single argument to support it, 
and the non-existence of life after death is in consonance with the 
whole range of human knowledge.  On the other hand, resignation as 
preached by Buddha will fail to satisfy humanity, which has a 
longing for life, and is overcome by the thought of the 
inevitability of death."


Now here it is clear that by death he means the individual death, 
and by a future life the prolongation of individuality.  But 
Buddhism does not in truth appear ever to have been concerned with 
that, and modern religious developments are certainly not under that 
preoccupation with the narrower self.  Buddhism indeed so far from 
"preaching resignation" to death, seeks as its greater good a death 
so complete as to be absolute release from the individual's burthen 
of KARMA.  Buddhism seeks an ESCAPE FROM INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY.  
The deeper one pursues religious thought the more nearly it 
approximates to a search for escape from the self-centred life and 
over-individuation, and the more it diverges from Professor 
Metchnikoff's assertion of its aims.  Salvation is indeed to lose 
one's self.  But Professor Metchnikoff having roundly denied that 
this is so, is then left free to take the very essentials of the 
religious life as they are here conceived and present them as if 
they were the antithesis of the religious life.  His book, when it 
is analysed, resolves itself into just that research for an escape 
from the painful accidents and chagrins of individuation, which is 
the ultimate of religion.

At times, indeed, he seems almost wilfully blind to the true 
solution round and about which his writing goes.  He suggests as his 
most hopeful satisfaction for the cravings of the human heart, such 
a scientific prolongation of life that the instinct for self-
preservation will be at last extinct.  If that is not the very 
"resignation" he imputes to the Buddhist I do not know what it is.  
He believes that an individual which has lived fully and completely 
may at last welcome death with the same instinctive readiness as, in 
the days of its strength, it shows for the embraces of its mate.  We 
are to be glutted by living to six score and ten.  We are to rise 
from the table at last as gladly as we sat down.  We shall go to 
death as unresistingly as tired children go to bed.  Men are to have 
a life far beyond the range of what is now considered their prime, 
and their last period (won by scientific self-control) will be a 
period of ripe wisdom (from seventy to eighty to a hundred and 
twenty or thereabouts) and public service!

(But why, one asks, public service?  Why not book-collecting or the 
simple pleasure of reminiscence so dear to aged egotists?  
Metchnikoff never faces that question.  And again, what of the man 
who is challenged to die for right at the age of thirty?  What does 
the prolongation of life do for him?  And where are the consolations 
for accidental misfortune, for the tormenting disease or the lost 
limb?)

But in his peroration Professor Metchnikoff lapses into pure 
religiosity.  The prolongation of life gives place to sheer self-
sacrifice as the fundamental "remedy."  And indeed what other remedy 
has ever been conceived for the general evil of life?


"On the other hand," he writes, "the knowledge that the goal of 
human life can be attained only by the development of a high degree 
of solidarity amongst men will restrain actual egotism.  The mere 
fact that the enjoyment of life according to the precepts of Solomon 
(Ecelesiastes ix. 7-10)* is opposed to the goal of human life, will 
lessen luxury and the evil that comes from luxury.  Conviction that 
science alone is able to redress the disharmonies of the human 
constitution will lead directly to the improvement of education and 
to the solidarity of mankind.

* Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a 
merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.  Let thy garments be 
always white; and let thy head lack no ointment.  Live joyfully with 
the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, 
which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity 
for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou 
takest under the sun.  whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with 
thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor 
wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

"In progress towards the goal, nature will have to be consulted 
continuously.  Already, in the case of the ephemerids, nature has 
produced a complete cycle of normal life ending in natural death.  
In the problem of his own fate, man must not be content with the 
gifts of nature; he must direct them by his own efforts.  Just as he 
has been able to modify the nature of animals and plants, man must 
attempt to modify his own constitution, so as to readjust its 
disharmonies. . . .

"To modify the human constitution, it will be necessary first, to 
frame the ideal, and thereafter to set to work with all the 
resources of science.

"If there can be formed an ideal able to unite men in a kind of 
religion of the future, this ideal must be founded on scientific 
principles.  And if it be true, as has been asserted so often, that 
man can live by faith alone, the faith must be in the power of 
science."


Now this, after all the flat repudiations that have preceded it of 
"religion" and "philosophy" as remedies for human ills, is nothing 
less than the fundamental proposition of the religious life 
translated into terms of materialistic science, the proposition that 
damnation is really over-individuation and that salvahon is escape 
from self into the larger being of life. . . .

What can this "religion of the future" be but that devotion to the 
racial adventure under the captaincy of God which we have already 
found, like gold in the bottom of the vessel, when we have washed 
away the confusions and impurities of dogmatic religion?  By an 
inquiry setting out from a purely religious starting-point we have 
already reached conclusions identical with this ultimate refuge of 
an extreme materialist.

This altar to the Future of his, we can claim as an altar to our 
God--an altar rather indistinctly inscribed.



2. SACRIFICE IMPLIES GOD


Almost all Agnostic and Atheistical writings that show any fineness 
and generosity of spirit, have this tendency to become as it were 
the statement of an anonymous God.  Everything is said that a 
religious writer would say--except that God is not named.  Religious 
metaphors abound.  It is as if they accepted the living body of 
religion but denied the bones that held it together--as they might 
deny the bones of a friend.  It is true, they would admit, the body 
moves in a way that implies bones in its every movement, but --WE 
HAVE NEVER SEEN THOSE BONES.

The disputes in theory--I do not say the difference in reality--
between the modern believer and the atheist or agnostic--becomes at 
times almost as impalpable as that subtle discussion dear to 
students of physics, whether the scientific "ether" is real or a 
formula.  Every material phenomenon is consonant with and helps to 
define this ether, which permeates and sustains and is all things, 
which nevertheless is perceptible to no sense, which is reached only 
by an intellectual process.  Most minds are disposed to treat this 
ether as a reality.  But the acutely critical mind insists that what 
is only so attainable by inference is not real; it is no more than 
"a formula that satisfies all phenomena."

But if it comes to that, am I anything more than the formula that 
satisfies all my forms of consciousness?

Intellectually there is hardly anything more than a certain will to 
believe, to divide the religious man who knows God to be utterly 
real, from the man who says that God is merely a formula to satisfy 
moral and spiritual phenomena.  The former has encountered him, the 
other has as yet felt only unassigned impulses.  One says God's will 
is so; the other that Right is so.  One says God moves me to do this 
or that; the other the Good Will in me which I share with you and 
all well-disposed men, moves me to do this or that.  But the former 
makes an exterior reference and escapes a risk of self-
righteousness.

I have recently been reading a book by Mr. Joseph McCabe called "The 
Tyranny of Shams," in which he displays very typically this curious 
tendency to a sort of religion with God "blacked out."  His is an 
extremely interesting case.  He is a writer who was formerly a Roman 
Catholic priest, and in his reaction from Catholicism he displays a 
resolution even sterner than Professor Metchnikoff's, to deny that 
anything religious or divine can exist, that there can be any aim in 
life except happiness, or any guide but "science."  But--and here 
immediately he turns east again--he is careful not to say 
"individual happiness."  And he says "Pleasure is, as Epicureans 
insisted, only a part of a large ideal of happiness."  So he lets 
the happiness of devotion and sacrifice creep in.  So he opens 
indefinite possibilities of getting away from any merely 
materialistic rule of life.  And he writes:


"In every civilised nation the mass of the people are inert and 
indifferent.  Some even make a pretence of justifying their 
inertness.  Why, they ask, should we stir at all?  Is there such a 
thing as a duty to improve the earth?  What is the meaning or 
purpose of life?  Or has it a purpose?

"One generally finds that this kind of reasoning is merely a piece 
of controversial athletics or a thin excuse for idleness.  People 
tell you that the conflict of science and religion--it would be 
better to say, the conflict of modern culture and ancient 
traditions--has robbed life of its plain significance.  The men who, 
like Tolstoi, seriously urge this point fail to appreciate the 
modern outlook on life.  Certainly modern culture--science, history, 
philosophy, and art--finds no purpose in life: that is to say, no 
purpose eternally fixed and to be discovered by man.  A great 
chemist said a few years ago that he could imagine 'a series of 
lucky accidents'--the chance blowing by the wind of certain 
chemicals into pools on the primitive earth--accounting for the 
first appearance of life; and one might not unjustly sum up the 
influences which have lifted those early germs to the level of 
conscious beings as a similar series of lucky accidents.

"But it is sheer affectation to say that this demoralises us.  If 
there is no purpose impressed on the universe, or prefixed to the 
development of humanity, it follows only that humanity may choose 
its own purpose and set up its own goal; and the most elementary 
sense of order will teach us that this choice must be social, not 
merely individual.  In whatever measure ill-controlled individuals 
may yield to personal impulses or attractions, the aim of the race 
must be a collective aim.  I do not mean an austere demand of self-
sacrifice from the individual, but an adjustment--as genial and 
generous as possible--of individual variations for common good.  
Otherwise life becomes discordant and futile, and the pain and waste 
react on each individual.  So we raise again, in the twentieth 
century, the old question of 'the greatest good,' which men 
discussed in the Stoa Poikile and the suburban groves of Athens, in 
the cool atria of patrician mansions on the Palatine and the 
Pincian, in the Museum at Alexandria, and the schools which Omar 
Khayyam frequented, in the straw-strewn schools of the Middle Ages 
and the opulent chambers of Cosimo dei Medici."


And again:


"The old dream of a co-operative effort to improve life, to bring 
happiness to as many minds of mortals as we can reach, shines above 
all the mists of the day.  Through the ruins of creeds and 
philosophies, which have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our 
steps toward that height--just as the Athenians did two thousand 
years ago.  It rests on no metaphysic, no sacred legend, no 
disputable tradition--nothing that scepticism can corrode or 
advancing knowledge undermine.  Its foundations are the fundamental 
and unchanging impulses of our nature."


And again:


"The revolt which burns in so much of the abler literature of our 
time is an unselfish revolt, or non-selfish revolt: it is an outcome 
of that larger spirit which conceives the self to be a part of the 
general social organism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor 
altruistic.  It finds a sanction in the new intelligence, and an 
inspiration in the finer sentiments of our generation, but the glow 
which chiefly illumines it is the glow of the great vision of a 
happier earth.  It speaks of the claims of truth and justice, and 
assails untruth and injustice, for these are elemental principles of 
social life; but it appeals more confidently to the warmer sympathy 
which is linking the scattered children of the race, and it urges 
all to co-operate in the restriction of suffering and the creation 
of happiness.  The advance guard of the race, the men and women in 
whom mental alertness is associated with fine feeling, cry that they 
have reached Pisgah's slope and in increasing numbers men and women 
are pressing on to see if it be really the Promised Land."


"Pisgah--the Promised Land!"  Mr.  McCabe in that passage sounds as 
if he were half-way to "Oh! Beulah Land!" and the tambourine.

That "larger spirit," we maintain, is God; those "impulses" are the 
power of God, and Mr. McCabe serves a Master he denies.  He has but 
to realise fully that God is not necessarily the Triune God of the 
Catholic Church, and banish his intense suspicion that he may yet be 
lured back to that altar he abandoned, he has but to look up from 
that preoccupation, and immediately he will begin to realise the 
presence of Divinity.



3. GOD IS AN EXTERNAL REALITY


It may be argued that if atheists and agnostics when they set 
themselves to express the good will that is in them, do shape out 
God, that if their conception of right living falls in so completely 
with the conception of God's service as to be broadly identical, 
then indeed God, like the ether of scientific speculation, is no 
more than a theory, no more than an imaginative externalisation of 
man's inherent good will.  Why trouble about God then?  Is not the 
declaration of a good disposition a sufficient evidence of 
salvation?  What is the difference between such benevolent 
unbelievers as Professor Metchnikoff or Mr. McCabe and those who 
have found God?

The difference is this, that the benevolent atheist stands alone 
upon his own good will, without a reference, without a standard, 
trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral 
strength.  A certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs 
like a precipice above him; incalculable temptations open like gulfs 
beneath his feet.  He has not really given himself or got away from 
himself.  He has no one to whom he can give himself.  He is still a 
masterless man.  His exaltation is self-centred, is priggishness, 
his fall is unrestrained by any exterior obligation.  His devotion 
is only the good will in himself, a disposition; it is a mood that 
may change.  At any moment it may change.  He may have pledged 
himself to his own pride and honour, but who will hold him to his 
bargain?  He has no source of strength beyond his own amiable 
sentiments, his conscience speaks with an unsupported voice, and no 
one watches while he sleeps.  He cannot pray; he can but ejaculate.  
He has no real and living link with other men of good will.

And those whose acquiescence in the idea of God is merely 
intellectual are in no better case than those who deny God 
altogether.  They may have all the forms of truth and not divinity.  
The religion of the atheist with a God-shaped blank at its heart and 
the persuasion of the unconverted theologian, are both like lamps 
unlit.  The lit lamp has no difference in form from the lamp unlit.  
But the lit lamp is alive and the lamp unlit is asleep or dead.

The difference between the unconverted and the unbeliever and the 
servant of the true God is this; it is that the latter has 
experienced a complete turning away from self.  This only difference 
is all the difference in the world.  It is the realisation that this 
goodness that I thought was within me and of myself and upon which I 
rather prided myself, is without me and above myself, and infinitely 
greater and stronger than I.  It is the immortal and I am mortal.  
It is invincible and steadfast in its purpose, and I am weak and 
insecure.  It is no longer that I, out of my inherent and remarkable 
goodness, out of the excellence of my quality and the benevolence of 
my heart, give a considerable amount of time and attention to the 
happiness and welfare of others--because I choose to do so.  On the 
contrary I have come under a divine imperative, I am obeying an 
irresistible call, I am a humble and willing servant of the 
righteousness of God.  That altruism which Professor Metchnikoff and 
Mr. McCabe would have us regard as the goal and refuge of a broad 
and free intelligence, is really the first simple commandment in the 
religious life.



4. ANOTHER RELIGIOUS MATERIALIST


Now here is a passage from a book, "Evolution and the War," by 
Professor Metchnikoff's translator, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, which 
comes even closer to our conception of God as an immortal being 
arising out of man, and external to the individual man.  He has been 
discussing that well-known passage of Kant's: "Two things fill my 
mind with ever-renewed wonder and awe the more often and deeper I 
dwell on them--the starry vault above me, and the moral law within 
me."

From that discussion, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell presently comes to this 
most definite and interesting statement:


"Writing as a hard-shell Darwinian evolutionist, a lover of the 
scalpel and microscope, and of patient, empirical observation, as 
one who dislikes all forms of supernaturalism, and who does not 
shrink from the implications even of the phrase that thought is a 
secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, I assert 
as a biological fact that the moral law is as real and as external 
to man as the starry vault.  It has no secure seat in any single man 
or in any single nation.  It is the work of the blood and tears of 
long generations of men.  It is not in man, inborn or innate, but is 
enshrined in his traditions, in his customs, in his literature and 
his religion.  Its creation and sustenance are the crowning glory of 
man, and his consciousness of it puts him in a high place above the 
animal world.  Men live and die; nations rise and fall, but the 
struggle of individual lives and of individual nations must be 
measured not by their immediate needs, but as they tend to the 
debasement or perfection of man's great achievement."


This is the same reality.  This is the same Link and Captain that 
this book asserts.  It seems to me a secondary matter whether we 
call Him "Man's Great Achievement" or "The Son of Man" or the "God 
of Mankind" or "God."  So far as the practical and moral ends of 
life are concerned, it does not matter how we explain or refuse to 
explain His presence in our lives.

There is but one possible gap left between the position of Dr. 
Chalmers Mitchell and the position of this book.  In this book it is 
asserted that GOD RESPONDS, that he GIVES courage and the power of 
self-suppression to our weakness.



5. A NOTE ON A LECTURE BY PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY


Let me now quote and discuss a very beautiful passage from a lecture 
upon Stoicism by Professor Gilbert Murray, which also displays the 
same characteristic of an involuntary shaping out of God in the 
forms of denial.  It is a passage remarkable for its conscientious 
and resolute Agnosticism.  And it is remarkable too for its 
blindness to the possibility of separating quite completely the idea 
of the Infinite Being from the idea of God.  It is another striking 
instance of that obsession of modern minds by merely Christian 
theology of which I have already complained.  Professor Murray has 
quoted Mr. Bevan's phrase for God, "the Friend behind phenomena," 
and he does not seem to realise that that phrase carries with it no 
obligation whatever to believe that this Friend is in control of the 
phenomena.  He assumes that he is supposed to be in control as if it 
were a matter of course:


"We do seem to find," Professor Murray writes, "not only in all 
religions, but in practically all philosophies, some belief that man 
is not quite alone in the universe, but is met in his endeavours 
towards the good by some external help or sympathy.  We find it 
everywhere in the unsophisticated man.  We find it in the unguarded 
self-revelations of the most severe and conscientious Atheists.  
Now, the Stoics, like many other schools of thought, drew an 
argument from this consensus of all mankind.  It was not an absolute 
proof of the existence of the Gods or Providence, but it was a 
strong indication.  The existence of a common instinctive belief in 
the mind of man gives at least a presumption that there must be a 
good cause for that belief.

"This is a reasonable position.  There must be some such cause.  But 
it does not follow that the only valid cause is the truth of the 
content of the belief.  I cannot help suspecting that this is 
precisely one of those points on which Stoicism, in company with 
almost all philosophy up to the present time, has gone astray 
through not sufficiently realising its dependence on the human mind 
as a natural biological product.  For it is very important in this 
matter to realise that the so-called belief is not really an 
intellectual judgment so much as a craving of the whole nature.

"It is only of very late years that psychologists have begun to 
realise the enormous dominion of those forces in man of which he is 
normally unconscious.  We cannot escape as easily as these brave men 
dreamed from the grip of the blind powers beneath the threshold.  
Indeed, as I see philosophy after philosophy falling into this 
unproven belief in the Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I 
myself cannot, except for a moment and by an effort, refrain from 
making the same assumption, it seems to me that perhaps here too we 
are under the spell of a very old ineradicable instinct.  We are 
gregarious animals; our ancestors have been such for countless ages.  
We cannot help looking out on the world as gregarious animals do; we 
see it in terms of humanity and of fellowship.  Students of animals 
under domestication have shown us how the habits of a gregarious 
creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in a thousand details 
by reference to the lost pack which is no longer there--the pack 
which a dog tries to smell his way back to all the time he is out 
walking, the pack he calls to for help when danger threatens.  It is 
a strange and touching thing, this eternal hunger of the gregarious 
animal for the herd of friends who are not there.  And it may be, it 
may very possibly be, that, in the matter of this Friend behind 
phenomena our own yearning and our own almost ineradicable 
instinctive conviction, since they are certainly not founded on 
either reason or observation, are in origin the groping of a lonely-
souled gregarious animal to find its herd or its herd-leader in the 
great spaces between the stars.

"At any rate, it is a belief very difficult to get rid of."


There the passage and the lecture end.

I would urge that here again is an inadvertent witness to the 
reality of God.

Professor Murray writes of gregarious animals as though there 
existed solitary animals that are not gregarious, pure 
individualists, "atheists" so to speak, and as though this appeal to 
a life beyond one's own was not the universal disposition of living 
things.  His classical training disposes him to a realistic 
exaggeration of individual difference.  But nearly every animal, and 
certainly every mentally considerable animal, begins under parental 
care, in a nest or a litter, mates to breed, and is associated for 
much of its life.  Even the great carnivores do not go alone except 
when they are old and have done with the most of life.  Every pack, 
every herd, begins at some point in a couple, it is the equivalent 
of the tiger's litter if that were to remain undispersed.  And it is 
within the memory of men still living that in many districts the 
African lion has with a change of game and conditions lapsed from a 
"solitary" to a gregarious, that is to say a prolonged family habit 
of life.

Man too, if in his ape-like phase he resembled the other higher 
apes, is an animal becoming more gregarious and not less.  He has 
passed within the historical period from a tribal gregariousness to 
a nearly cosmopolitan tolerance.  And he has his tribe about him.  
He is not, as Professor Murray seems to suggest, a solitary LOST 
gregarious beast.  Why should his desire for God be regarded as the 
overflow of an unsatisfied gregarious instinct, when he has home, 
town, society, companionship, trade union, state, INCREASINGLY at 
hand to glut it?  Why should gregariousness drive a man to God 
rather than to the third-class carriage and the public-house?  Why 
should gregariousness drive men out of crowded Egyptian cities into 
the cells of the Thebaid?  Schopenhauer in a memorable passage 
(about the hedgehogs who assembled for warmth) is flatly opposed to 
Professor Murray, and seems far more plausible when he declares that 
the nature of man is insufficiently gregarious.  The parallel with 
the dog is not a valid one.

Does not the truth lie rather in the supposition that it is not the 
Friend that is the instinctive delusion but the isolation?  Is not 
the real deception, our belief that we are completely 
individualised, and is it not possible that this that Professor 
Murray calls "instinct" is really not a vestige but a new thing 
arising out of our increasing understanding, an intellectual 
penetration to that greater being of the species, that vine, of 
which we are the branches?  Why should not the soul of the species, 
many faceted indeed, be nevertheless a soul like our own?

Here, as in the case of Professor Metchnikoff, and in many other 
cases of atheism, it seems to me that nothing but an inadequate 
understanding of individuation bars the way to at least the 
intellectual recognition of the true God.



6. RELIGION AS ETHICS


And while I am dealing with rationalists, let me note certain recent 
interesting utterances of Sir Harry Johnston's.  You will note that 
while in this book we use the word "God" to indicate the God of the 
Heart, Sir Harry uses "God" for that idea of God-of-the-Universe, 
which we have spoken of as the Infinite Being.  This use of the word 
"God" is of late theological origin; the original identity of the 
words "good" and "god" and all the stories of the gods are against 
him.  But Sir Harry takes up God only to define him away into 
incomprehensible necessity.  Thus:


"We know absolutely nothing concerning the Force we call God; and, 
assuming such an intelligent ruling force to be in existence, 
permeating this universe of millions of stars and (no doubt) tens of 
millions of planets, we do not know under what conditions and 
limitations It works.  We are quite entitled to assume that the end 
of such an influence is intended to be order out of chaos, happiness 
and perfection out of incompleteness and misery; and we are entitled 
to identify the reactionary forces of brute Nature with the 
anthropomorphic Devil of primitive religions, the power of darkness 
resisting the power of light.  But in these conjectures we must 
surely come to the conclusion that the theoretical potency we call 
'God' makes endless experiments, and scrap-heaps the failures.  
Think of the Dinosaurs and the expenditure of creative energy that 
went to their differentiation and their wellnigh incredible physical 
development. . . .

"To such a Divine Force as we postulate, the whole development and 
perfecting of life on this planet, the whole production of man, may 
seem little more than to any one of us would be the chipping out, 
the cutting, the carving, and the polishing of a gem; and we should 
feel as little remorse or pity for the scattered dust and fragments 
as must the Creative Force of the immeasurably vast universe feel 
for the DISJECTA MEMBRA of perfected life on this planet. . . ."


But thence he goes on to a curiously imperfect treatment of the God 
of man as if he consisted in nothing more than some vague sort of 
humanitarianism.  Sir Harry's ideas are much less thoroughly thought 
out than those of any other of these sceptical writers I have 
quoted.  On that account they are perhaps more typical.  He speaks 
as though Christ were simply an eminent but illreported and 
abominably served teacher of ethics--and yet of the only right ideal 
and ethics.  He speaks as though religions were nothing more than 
ethical movements, and as though Christianity were merely someone 
remarking with a bright impulsiveness that everything was simply 
horrid, and so, "Let us instal loving kindness as a cardinal axiom.   
He ignores altogether the fundamental essential of religion, which 
is THE DEVELOPMENT AND SYNTHESIS OF THE DIVERGENT AND CONFLICTING 
MOTIVES OF THE UNCONVERTED LIFE, AND THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE 
INDIVIDUAL LIFE WITH THE IMMORTAL PURPOSE OF GOD.  He presents a 
conception of religion relieved of its "nonsense" as the cheerful 
self-determination of a number of bright little individuals (much 
stirred but by no means overcome by Cosmic Pity) to the Service of 
Man.  As he seems to present it, it is as outward a thing, it goes 
as little into the intimacy of their lives, as though they had after 
proper consideration agreed to send a subscription to a Red Cross 
Ambulance or take part in a public demonstration against the 
Armenian Massacres, or do any other rather nice-spirited exterior 
thing.  This is what he says:


"I hope that the religion of the future will devote itself wholly to 
the Service of Man.  It can do so without departing from the 
Christian ideal and Christian ethics.  It need only drop all that is 
silly and disputable, and 'mattering not neither here nor there,' of 
Christian theology--a theology virtually absent from the direct 
teaching of Christ--and all of Judaistic literature or prescriptions 
not made immortal in their application by unassailable truth and by 
the confirmation of science.  An excellent remedy for the nonsense 
which still clings about religion may be found in two books: Cotter 
Monson's 'Service of Man,' which was published as long ago as 1887, 
and has since been re-issued by the Rationalist Press Association in 
its well-known sixpenny series, and J. Allanson Picton's 'Man and 
the Bible.'  Similarly, those who wish to acquire a sane view of the 
relations between man and God would do well to read Winwood Reade's 
'Martyrdom of Man.'"


Sir Harry in fact clears the ground for God very ably, and then 
makes a well-meaning gesture in the vacant space.  There is no help 
nor strength in his gesture unless God is there.  Without God, the 
"Service of Man" is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or an 
hypocrisy in the undisciplined prison of the mortal life.



CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE INVISIBLE KING


1. MODERN RELIGION A POLITICAL RELIGION


The conception of a young and energetic God, an Invisible Prince 
growing in strength and wisdom, who calls men and women to his 
service and who gives salvation from self and mortality only through 
self-abandonment to his service, necessarily involves a demand for a 
complete revision and fresh orientation of the life of the convert.

God faces the blackness of the Unknown and the blind joys and 
confusions and cruelties of Life, as one who leads mankind through a 
dark jungle to a great conquest.  He brings mankind not rest but a 
sword.  It is plain that he can admit no divided control of the 
world he claims.  He concedes nothing to Caesar.  In our philosophy 
there are no human things that are God's and others that are 
Caesar's.  Those of the new thought cannot render unto God the 
things that are God's, and to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.  
Whatever claim Caesar may make to rule men's lives and direct their 
destinies outside the will of God, is a usurpation.  No king nor 
Caesar has any right to tax or to service or to tolerance, except he 
claim as one who holds for and under God.  And he must make good his 
claim.  The steps of the altar of the God of Youth are no safe place 
for the sacrilegious figure of a king.  Who claims "divine right" 
plays with the lightning.

The new conceptions do not tolerate either kings or aristocracies or 
democracies.  Its implicit command to all its adherents is to make 
plain the way to the world theocracy.  Its rule of life is the 
discovery and service of the will of God, which dwells in the hearts 
of men, and the performance of that will, not only in the private 
life of the believer but in the acts and order of the state and 
nation of which he is a part.  I give myself to God not only because 
I am so and so but because I am mankind.  I become in a measure 
responsible for every evil in the world of men.  I become a knight 
in God's service.  I become my brother's keeper.  I become a 
responsible minister of my King.  I take sides against injustice, 
disorder, and against all those temporal kings, emperors, princes, 
landlords, and owners, who set themselves up against God's rule and 
worship.  Kings, owners, and all who claim rule and decisions in the 
world's affairs, must either show themselves clearly the fellow-
servants of the believer or become the objects of his steadfast 
antagonism.



2. THE WILL OF GOD


It is here that those who explain this modern religiosity will seem 
most arbitrary to the inquirer.  For they relate of God, as men will 
relate of a close friend, his dispositions, his apparent intentions, 
the aims of his kingship.  And just as they advance no proof 
whatever of the existence of God but their realisation of him, so 
with regard to these qualities and dispositions they have little 
argument but profound conviction.  What they say is this; that if 
you do not feel God then there is no persuading you of him; we 
cannot win over the incredulous.  And what they say of his qualities 
is this; that if you feel God then you will know, you will realise 
more and more clearly, that thus and thus and no other is his method 
and intention.

It comes as no great shock to those who have grasped the full 
implications of the statement that God is Finite, to hear it 
asserted that the first purpose of God is the attainment of clear 
knowledge, of knowledge as a means to more knowledge, and of 
knowledge as a means to power.  For that he must use human eyes and 
hands and brains.

And as God gathers power he uses it to an end that he is only 
beginning to apprehend, and that he will apprehend more fully as 
time goes on.  But it is possible to define the broad outlines of 
the attainment he seeks.  It is the conquest of death.

It is the conquest of death; first the overcoming of death in the 
individual by the incorporation of the motives of his life into an 
undying purpose, and then the defeat of that death that seems to 
threaten our species upon a cooling planet beneath a cooling sun.  
God fights against death in every form, against the great death of 
the race, against the petty death of indolence, insufficiency, 
baseness, misconception, and perversion.  He it is and no other who 
can deliver us "from the body of this death."  This is the battle 
that grows plainer; this is the purpose to which he calls us out of 
the animal's round of eating, drinking, lusting, quarrelling and 
laughing and weeping, fearing and failing, and presently of wearying 
and dying, which is the whole life that living without God can give 
us.  And from these great propositions there follow many very 
definite maxims and rules of life for those who serve God.  These we 
will immediately consider.



3. THE CRUCIFIX


But first let me write a few words here about those who hold a kind 
of intermediate faith between the worship of the God of Youth and 
the vaguer sort of Christianity.  There are a number of people 
closely in touch with those who have found the new religion who, 
biased probably by a dread of too complete a break with 
Christianity, have adopted a theogony which is very reminiscent of 
Gnosticism and of the Paulician, Catharist, and kindred sects to 
which allusion has already been made.  He, who is called in this 
book God, they would call God-the-Son or Christ, or the Logos; and 
what is here called the Darkness or the Veiled Being, they would 
call God-the-Father.  And what we speak of here as Life, they would 
call, with a certain disregard of the poor brutes that perish, Man.  
And they would assert, what we of the new belief, pleading our 
profound ignorance, would neither assert nor deny, that that 
Darkness, out of which came Life and God, since it produced them 
must be ultimately sympathetic and of like nature with them.  And 
that ultimately Man, being redeemed and led by Christ and saved from 
death by him, would be reconciled with God the Father.*  And this 
great adventurer out of the hearts of man that we here call God, 
they would present as the same with that teacher from Galilee who 
was crucified at Jerusalem.

* This probably was the conception of Spinoza.  Christ for him is 
the wisdom of God manifested in all things, and chiefly in the mind 
of man.  Through him we reach the blessedness of an intuitive 
knowledge of God.  Salvation is an escape from the "inadequate" 
ideas of the mortal human personality to the "adequate" and timeless 
ideas of God.

Now we of the modern way would offer the following criticisms upon 
this apparent compromise between our faith and the current religion.  
Firstly, we do not presume to theorise about the nature of the 
veiled being nor about that being's relations to God and to Life.  
We do not recognise any consistent sympathetic possibilities between 
these outer beings and our God.  Our God is, we feel, like 
Prometheus, a rebel.  He is unfilial.  And the accepted figure of 
Jesus, instinct with meek submission, is not in the tone of our 
worship.  It is not by suffering that God conquers death, but by 
fighting.  Incidentally our God dies a million deaths, but the thing 
that matters is not the deaths but the immortality.  It may be he 
cannot escape in this person or that person being nailed to a cross 
or chained to be torn by vultures on a rock.  These may be necessary 
sufferings, like hunger and thirst in a campaign; they do not in 
themselves bring victory.  They may be necessary, but they are not 
glorious.  The symbol of the crucifixion, the drooping, pain-
drenched figure of Christ, the sorrowful cry to his Father, "My God, 
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" these things jar with our 
spirit.  We little men may well fail and repent, but it is our faith 
that our God does not fail us nor himself.  We cannot accept the 
Christian's crucifix, or pray to a pitiful God.  We cannot accept 
the Resurrection as though it were an after-thought to a bitterly 
felt death.  Our crucifix, if you must have a crucifix, would show 
God with a hand or a foot already torn away from its nail, and with 
eyes not downcast but resolute against the sky; a face without pain, 
pain lost and forgotten in the surpassing glory of the struggle and 
the inflexible will to live and prevail. . . .

But we do not care how long the thorns are drawn, nor how terrible 
the wounds, so long as he does not droop.  God is courage.  God is 
courage beyond any conceivable suffering.

But when all this has been said, it is well to add that it concerns 
the figure of Christ only in so far as that professes to be the 
figure of God, and the crucifix only so far as that stands for 
divine action.  The figure of Christ crucified, so soon as we think 
of it as being no more than the tragic memorial of Jesus, of the man 
who proclaimed the loving-kindness of God and the supremacy of God's 
kingdom over the individual life, and who, in the extreme agony of 
his pain and exhaustion, cried out that he was deserted, becomes 
something altogether distinct from a theological symbol.  
Immediately that we cease to worship, we can begin to love and pity.  
Here was a being of extreme gentleness and delicacy and of great 
courage, of the utmost tolerance and the subtlest sympathy, a saint 
of non-resistance. . . .

We of the new faith repudiate the teaching of non-resistance.  We 
are the militant followers of and participators in a militant God.  
We can appreciate and admire the greatness of Christ, this gentle 
being upon whose nobility the theologians trade.  But submission is 
the remotest quality of all from our God, and a moribund figure is 
the completest inversion of his likeness as we know him.  A 
Christianity which shows, for its daily symbol, Christ risen and 
trampling victoriously upon a broken cross, would be far more in the 
spirit of our worship.*

* It is curious, after writing the above, to find in a letter 
written by Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, to that pertinacious 
correspondent, the late Lady Victoria Welby, almost exactly the same 
sentiments I have here expressed.  "If I could fill the Crucifix 
with life as you do," he says, "I would gladly look on it, but the 
fallen Head and the closed Eye exclude from my thought the idea of 
glorified humanity.  The Christ to whom we are led is One who 'hath 
been crucified,' who hath passed the trial victoriously and borne 
the fruits to heaven.  I dare not then rest on this side of the 
glory."

I find, too, a still more remarkable expression of the modern spirit 
in a tract, "The Call of the Kingdom," by that very able and subtle, 
Anglican theologian, the Rev. W. Temple, who declares that under the 
vitalising stresses of the war we are winning "faith in Christ as an 
heroic leader.  We have thought of Him so much as meek and gentle 
that there is no ground in our picture of Him, for the vision which 
His disciple had of Him: 'His head and His hair were white, as white 
wool, white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire: and His 
feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a 
furnace; and His voice was as the voice of many waters.  And He had 
in His right hand seven stars; and out of His mouth proceeded a 
sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in 
its strength.'"

These are both exceptional utterances, interesting as showing how 
clearly parallel are the tendencies within and without Christianity.



4. THE PRIMARY DUTIES


Now it follows very directly from the conception of God as a finite 
intelligence of boundless courage and limitless possibilities of 
growth and victory, who has pitted himself against death, who stands 
close to our inmost beings ready to receive us and use us, to rescue 
us from the chagrins of egotism and take us into his immortal 
adventure, that we who have realised him and given ourselves 
joyfully to him, must needs be equally ready and willing to give our 
energies to the task we share with him, to do our utmost to increase 
knowledge, to increase order and clearness, to fight against 
indolence, waste, disorder, cruelty, vice, and every form of his and 
our enemy, death, first and chiefest in ourselves but also in all 
mankind, and to bring about the establishment of his real and 
visible kingdom throughout the world.

And that idea of God as the Invisible King of the whole world means 
not merely that God is to be made and declared the head of the 
world, but that the kingdom of God is to be present throughout the 
whole fabric of the world, that the Kingdom of God is to be in the 
teaching at the village school, in the planning of the railway 
siding of the market town, in the mixing of the mortar at the 
building of the workman's house.  It means that ultimately no effigy 
of intrusive king or emperor is to disfigure our coins and stamps 
any more; God himself and no delegate is to be represented wherever 
men buy or sell, on our letters and our receipts, a perpetual 
witness, a perpetual reminder.  There is no act altogether without 
significance, no power so humble that it may not be used for or 
against God, no life but can orient itself to him.  To realise God 
in one's heart is to be filled with the desire to serve him, and the 
way of his service is neither to pull up one's life by the roots nor 
to continue it in all its essentials unchanged, but to turn it 
about, to turn everything that there is in it round into his way.

The outward duty of those who serve God must vary greatly with the 
abilities they possess and the positions in which they find 
themselves, but for all there are certain fundamental duties; a 
constant attempt to be utterly truthful with oneself, a constant 
sedulousness to keep oneself fit and bright for God's service, and 
to increase one's knowledge and powers, and a hidden persistent 
watchfulness of one's baser motives, a watch against fear and 
indolence, against vanity, against greed and lust, against envy, 
malice, and uncharitableness.  To have found God truly does in 
itself make God's service one's essential motive, but these evils 
lurk in the shadows, in the lassitudes and unwary moments.  No one 
escapes them altogether, there is no need for tragic moods on 
account of imperfections.  We can no more serve God without blunders 
and set-backs than we can win battles without losing men.  But the 
less of such loss the better.  The servant of God must keep his mind 
as wide and sound and his motives as clean as he can, just as an 
operating surgeon must keep his nerves and muscles as fit and his 
hands as clean as he can.  Neither may righteously evade exercise 
and regular washing--of mind as of hands.  An incessant watchfulness 
of one's self and one's thoughts and the soundness of one's 
thoughts; cleanliness, clearness, a wariness against indolence and 
prejudice, careful truth, habitual frankness, fitness and steadfast 
work; these are the daily fundamental duties that every one who 
truly comes to God will, as a matter of course, set before himself.



5. THE INCREASING KINGDOM


Now of the more intimate and personal life of the believer it will 
be more convenient to write a little later.  Let us for the present 
pursue the idea of this world-kingdom of God, to whose establishment 
he calls us.  This kingdom is to be a peaceful and co-ordinated 
activity of all mankind upon certain divine ends.  These, we 
conceive, are first, the maintenance of the racial life; secondly, 
the exploration of the external being of nature as it is and as it 
has been, that is to say history and science; thirdly, that 
exploration of inherent human possibility which is art; fourthly, 
that clarification of thought and knowledge which is philosophy; and 
finally, the progressive enlargement and development of the racial 
life under these lights, so that God may work through a continually 
better body of humanity and through better and better equipped 
minds, that he and our race may increase for ever, working 
unendingly upon the development of the powers of life and the 
mastery of the blind forces of matter throughout the deeps of space.  
He sets out with us, we are persuaded, to conquer ourselves and our 
world and the stars.  And beyond the stars our eyes can as yet see 
nothing, our imaginations reach and fail.  Beyond the limits of our 
understanding is the veiled Being of Fate, whose face is hidden from 
us. . . .

It may be that minds will presently appear among us of such a 
quality that the face of that Unknown will not be altogether 
hidden. . . .

But the business of such ordinary lives as ours is the setting up of 
this earthly kingdom of God.  That is the form into which our lives 
must fall and our consciences adapt themselves.

Belief in God as the Invisible King brings with it almost 
necessarily a conception of this coming kingdom of God on earth.  
Each believer as he grasps this natural and immediate consequence of 
the faith that has come into his life will form at the same time a 
Utopian conception of this world changed in the direction of God's 
purpose.  The vision will follow the realisation of God's true 
nature and purpose as a necessary second step.  And he will begin to 
develop the latent citizen of this world-state in himself.  He will 
fall in with the idea of the world-wide sanities of this new order 
being drawn over the warring outlines of the present, and of men 
falling out of relationship with the old order and into relationship 
with the new.  Many men and women are already working to-day at 
tasks that belong essentially to God's kingdom, tasks that would be 
of the same essential nature if the world were now a theocracy; for 
example, they are doing or sustaining scientific research or 
education or creative art; they are making roads to bring men 
together, they are doctors working for the world's health, they are 
building homes, they are constructing machinery to save and increase 
the powers of men. . . .

Such men and women need only to change their orientation as men will 
change about at a work-table when the light that was coming in a 
little while ago from the southern windows, begins presently to come 
in chiefly from the west, to become open and confessed servants of 
God.  This work that they were doing for ambition, or the love of 
men or the love of knowledge or what seemed the inherent impulse to 
the work itself, or for money or honour or country or king, they 
will realise they are doing for God and by the power of God.  Self-
transformation into a citizen of God's kingdom and a new realisation 
of all earthly politics as no more than the struggle to define and 
achieve the kingdom of God in the earth, follow on, without any need 
for a fresh spiritual impulse, from the moment when God and the 
believer meet and clasp one another.

This transfiguration of the world into a theocracy may seem a merely 
fantastic idea to anyone who comes to it freshly without such 
general theological preparation as the preceding pages have made.  
But to anyone who has been at the pains to clear his mind even a 
little from the obsession of existing but transitory things, it 
ceases to be a mere suggestion and becomes more and more manifestly 
the real future of mankind.  From the phase of "so things should 
be," the mind will pass very rapidly to the realisation that "so 
things will be."  Towards this the directive wills among men have 
been drifting more and more steadily and perceptibly and with fewer 
eddyings and retardations, for many centuries.  The purpose of 
mankind will not be always thus confused and fragmentary.  This 
dissemination of will-power is a phase.  The age of the warring 
tribes and kingdoms and empires that began a hundred centuries or so 
ago, draws to its close.  The kingdom of God on earth is not a 
metaphor, not a mere spiritual state, not a dream, not an uncertain 
project; it is the thing before us, it is the close and inevitable 
destiny of mankind.

In a few score years the faith of the true God will be spreading 
about the world.  The few halting confessions of God that one hears 
here and there to-day, like that little twittering of birds which 
comes before the dawn, will have swollen to a choral unanimity.  In 
but a few centuries the whole world will be openly, confessedly, 
preparing for the kingdom.  In but a few centuries God will have led 
us out of the dark forest of these present wars and confusions into 
the open brotherhood of his rule.



6. WHAT IS MY PLACE IN THE KINGDOM?


This conception of the general life of mankind as a transformation 
at thousands of points of the confused, egotistical, proprietary, 
partisan, nationalist, life-wasting chaos of human life to-day into 
the coherent development of the world kingdom of God, provides the 
form into which everyone who comes to the knowledge of God will 
naturally seek to fit his every thought and activity.  The material 
greeds, the avarice, fear, rivalries, and ignoble ambitions of a 
disordered world will be challenged and examined under one general 
question: "What am I in the kingdom of God?"

It has already been suggested that there is a great and growing 
number of occupations that belong already to God's kingdom, 
research, teaching, creative art, creative administration, 
cultivation, construction, maintenance, and the honest satisfaction 
of honest practical human needs.  For such people conversion to the 
intimacy of God means at most a change in the spirit of their work, 
a refreshed energy, a clearer understanding, a new zeal, a completer 
disregard of gains and praises and promotion.  Pay, honours, and the 
like cease to be the inducement of effort.  Service, and service 
alone, is the criterion that the quickened conscience will 
recognise.

Most of such people will find themselves in positions in which 
service is mingled with activities of a baser sort, in which service 
is a little warped and deflected by old traditions and usage, by 
mercenary and commercial considerations, by some inherent or special 
degradation of purpose.  The spirit of God will not let the believer 
rest until his life is readjusted and as far as possible freed from 
the waste of these base diversions.  For example a scientific 
investigator, lit and inspired by great inquiries, may be hampered 
by the conditions of his professorship or research fellowship, which 
exact an appearance of "practical" results.  Or he may be obliged to 
lecture or conduct classes.  He may be able to give but half his 
possible gift to the work of his real aptitude, and that at a 
sacrifice of money and reputation among short-sighted but 
influential contemporaries.  Well, if he is by nature an 
investigator he will know that the research is what God needs of 
him.  He cannot continue it at all if he leaves his position, and so 
he must needs waste something of his gift to save the rest.  But 
should a poorer or a humbler post offer him better opportunity, 
there lies his work for God.  There one has a very common and simple 
type of the problems that will arise in the lives of men when they 
are lit by sudden realisation of the immediacy of God.

Akin to that case is the perplexity of any successful physician 
between the increase of knowledge and the public welfare on the one 
hand, and the lucrative possibilities of his practice among wealthy 
people on the other.  He belongs to a profession that is crippled by 
a mediaeval code, a profession which was blind to the common 
interest of the Public Health and regarded its members merely as 
skilled practitioners employed to "cure" individual ailments.  Very 
slowly and tortuously do the methods of the profession adapt 
themselves to the modern conception of an army of devoted men 
working as a whole under God for the health of mankind as a whole, 
broadening out from the frowsy den of the "leech," with its 
crocodile and bottles and hieroglyphic prescriptions, to a skilled 
and illuminating co-operation with those who deal with the food and 
housing and economic life of the community.

And again quite parallel with these personal problems is the trouble 
of the artist between the market and vulgar fame on the one hand and 
his divine impulse on the other.

The presence of God will be a continual light and help in every 
decision that must be made by men and women in these more or less 
vitiated, but still fundamentally useful and righteous, positions.

The trouble becomes more marked and more difficult in the case of a 
man who is a manufacturer or a trader, the financier of business 
enterprise or the proprietor of great estates.  The world is in need 
of manufactures and that goods should be distributed; land must be 
administered and new economic possibilities developed.  The drift of 
things is in the direction of state ownership and control, but in a 
great number of cases the state is not ripe for such undertakings, 
it commands neither sufficient integrity nor sufficient ability, and 
the proprietor of factory, store, credit or land, must continue in 
possession, holding as a trustee for God and, so far as lies in his 
power, preparing for his supersession by some more public 
administration.  Modern religion admits of no facile flights from 
responsibility.  It permits no headlong resort to the wilderness and 
sterile virtue.  It counts the recluse who fasts among scorpions in 
a cave as no better than a deserter in hiding.  It unhesitatingly 
forbids any rich young man to sell all that he has and give to the 
poor.  Himself and all that he has must be alike dedicated to God.

The plain duty that will be understood by the proprietor of land and 
of every sort of general need and service, so soon as he becomes 
aware of God, is so to administer his possessions as to achieve the 
maximum of possible efficiency, the most generous output, and the 
least private profit.  He may set aside a salary for his 
maintenance; the rest he must deal with like a zealous public 
official.  And if he perceives that the affair could be better 
administered by other hands than his own, then it is his business to 
get it into those hands with the smallest delay and the least profit 
to himself. . . .

The rights and wrongs of human equity are very different from right 
and wrong in the sight of God.  In the sight of God no landlord has 
a RIGHT to his rent, no usurer has a RIGHT to his interest.  A man 
is not justified in drawing the profits from an advantageous 
agreement nor free to spend the profits of a speculation as he will.  
God takes no heed of savings nor of abstinence.  He recognises no 
right to the "rewards of abstinence," no right to any rewards.  
Those profits and comforts and consolations are the inducements that 
dangle before the eyes of the spiritually blind.  Wealth is an 
embarrassment to the religious, for God calls them to account for 
it.  The servant of God has no business with wealth or power except 
to use them immediately in the service of God.  Finding these things 
in his hands he is bound to administer them in the service of God.

The tendency of modern religion goes far beyond the alleged 
communism of the early Christians, and far beyond the tithes of the 
scribes and Pharisees.  God takes all.  He takes you, blood and 
bones and house and acres, he takes skill and influence and 
expectations.  For all the rest of your life you are nothing but 
God's agent.  If you are not prepared for so complete a surrender, 
then you are infinitely remote from God.  You must go your way.  
Here you are merely a curious interloper.  Perhaps you have been 
desiring God as an experience, or covetmg him as a possession.  You 
have not begun to understand.  This that we are discussing in this 
book is as yet nothing for you.



7. ADJUSTING LIFE


This picturing of a human world more to the mind of God than this 
present world and the discovery and realisation of one's own place 
and work in and for that kingdom of God, is the natural next phase 
in the development of the believer.  He will set about revising and 
adjusting his scheme of life, his ways of living, his habits and his 
relationships in the light of his new convictions.

Most men and women who come to God will have already a certain 
righteousness in their lives; these things happen like a thunderclap 
only in strange exceptional cases, and the same movements of the 
mind that have brought them to God will already have brought their 
lives into a certain rightness of direction and conduct.  Yet 
occasionally there will be someone to whom the self-examination that 
follows conversion will reveal an entirely wrong and evil way of 
living.  It may be that the light has come to some rich idler doing 
nothing but follow a pleasurable routine.  Or to someone following 
some highly profitable and amusing, but socially useless or socially 
mischievous occupation.  One may be an advocate at the disposal of 
any man's purpose, or an actor or actress ready to fall in with any 
theatrical enterprise.  Or a woman may find herself a prostitute or 
a pet wife, a mere kept instrument of indulgence.  These are lives 
of prey, these are lives of futility; the light of God will not 
tolerate such lives.  Here religion can bring nothing but a 
severance from the old way of life altogether, a break and a 
struggle towards use and service and dignity.

But even here it does not follow that because a life has been wrong 
the new life that begins must be far as the poles asunder from the 
old.  Every sort of experience that has ever come to a human being 
is in the self that he brings to God, and there is no reason why a 
knowledge of evil ways should not determine the path of duty.  No 
one can better devise protections against vices than those who have 
practised them; none know temptations better than those who have 
fallen.  If a man has followed an evil trade, it becomes him to use 
his knowledge of the tricks of that trade to help end it.  He knows 
the charities it may claim and the remedies it needs. . . .

A very interesting case to discuss in relation to this question of 
adjustment is that of the barrister.  A practising barrister under 
contemporary conditions does indeed give most typically the 
opportunity for examining the relation of an ordinary self-
respecting wordly life, to life under the dispensation of God 
discovered.  A barrister is usually a man of some energy and 
ambition, his honour is moulded by the traditions of an ancient and 
antiquated profession, instinctively self-preserving and yet with a 
real desire for consistency and respect.  As a profession it has 
been greedy and defensively conservative, but it has never been 
shameless nor has it ever broken faith with its own large and 
selfish, but quite definite, propositions.  It has never for 
instance had the shamelessness of such a traditionless and 
undisciplined class as the early factory organisers.  It has never 
had the dull incoherent wickedness of the sort of men who exploit 
drunkenness and the turf.  It offends within limits.  Barristers can 
be, and are, disbarred.  But it is now a profession extraordinarily 
out of date; its code of honour derives from a time of cruder and 
lower conceptions of human relationship.  It apprehends the State as 
a mere "ring" kept about private disputations; it has not begun to 
move towards the modern conception of the collective enterprise as 
the determining criterion of human conduct.  It sees its business as 
a mere play upon the rules of a game between man and man, or between 
men and men.  They haggle, they dispute, they inflict and suffer 
wrongs, they evade dues, and are liable or entitled to penalties and 
compensations.  The primary business of the law is held to be 
decision in these wrangles, and as wrangling is subject to artistic 
elaboration, the business of the barrister is the business of a 
professional wrangler; he is a bravo in wig and gown who fights the 
duels of ordinary men because they are incapable, very largely on 
account of the complexities of legal procedure, of fighting for 
themselves.  His business is never to explore any fundamental right 
in the matter.  His business is to say all that can be said for his 
client, and to conceal or minimise whatever can be said against his 
client.  The successful promoted advocate, who in Britain and the 
United States of America is the judge, and whose habits and 
interests all incline him to disregard the realities of the case in 
favour of the points in the forensic game, then adjudicates upon the 
contest. . . .

Now this condition of things is clearly incompatible with the modern 
conception of the world as becoming a divine kingdom.  When the 
world is openly and confessedly the kingdom of God, the law court 
will exist only to adjust the differing views of men as to the 
manner of their service to God; the only right of action one man 
will have against another will be that he has been prevented or 
hampered or distressed by the other in serving God.  The idea of the 
law court will have changed entirely from a place of dispute, 
exaction and vengeance, to a place of adjustment.  The individual or 
some state organisation will plead ON BEHALF OF THE COMMON GOOD 
either against some state official or state regulation, or against 
the actions or inaction of another individual.  This is the only 
sort of legal proceedings compatible with the broad beliefs of the 
new faith. . . .  Every religion that becomes ascendant, in so far 
as it is not otherworldly, must necessarily set its stamp upon the 
methods and administration of the law.  That this was not the case 
with Christianity is one of the many contributory aspects that lead 
one to the conviction that it was not Christianity that took 
possession of the Roman empire, but an imperial adventurer who took 
possession of an all too complaisant Christianity.

Reverting now from these generalisations to the problem of the 
religious from which they arose, it will have become evident that 
the essential work of anyone who is conversant with the existing 
practice and literature of the law and whose natural abilities are 
forensic, will lie in the direction of reconstructing the theory and 
practice of the law in harmony with modern conceptions, of making 
that theory and practice clear and plain to ordinary men, of 
reforming the abuses of the profession by working for the separation 
of bar and judiciary, for the amalgamation of the solicitors and the 
barristers, and the like needed reforms.  These are matters that 
will probably only be properly set right by a quickening of 
conscience among lawyers themselves.  Of no class of men is the help 
and service so necessary to the practical establishment of God's 
kingdom, as of men learned and experienced in the law.  And there is 
no reason why for the present an advocate should not continue to 
plead in the courts, provided he does his utmost only to handle 
cases in which he believes he can serve the right.  Few righteous 
cases are ill-served by a frank disposition on the part of lawyer 
and client to put everything before the court.  Thereby of course 
there arises a difficult case of conscience.  What if a lawyer, 
believing his client to be in the right, discovers him to be in the 
wrong?  He cannot throw up the case unless he has been scandalously 
deceived, because so he would betray the confidence his client has 
put in him to "see him through."  He has a right to "give himself 
away," but not to "give away" his client in this fashion.  If he has 
a chance of a private consultation I think he ought to do his best 
to make his client admit the truth of the case and give in, but 
failing this he has no right to be virtuous on behalf of another.  
No man may play God to another; he may remonstrate, but that is the 
limit of his right.  He must respect a confidence, even if it is 
purely implicit and involuntary.  I admit that here the barrister is 
in a cleft stick, and that he must see the business through 
according to the confidence his client has put in him--and 
afterwards be as sorry as he may be if an injustice ensues.  And 
also I would suggest a lawyer may with a fairly good conscience 
defend a guilty man as if he were innocent, to save him from 
unjustly heavy penalties. . . .

This comparatively full discussion of the barrister's problem has 
been embarked upon because it does bring in, in a very typical 
fashion, just those uncertainties and imperfections that abound in 
real life.  Religious conviction gives us a general direction, but 
it stands aside from many of these entangled struggles in the jungle 
of conscience.  Practice is often easier than a rule.  In practice a 
lawyer will know far more accurately than a hypothetical case can 
indicate, how far he is bound to see his client through, and how far 
he may play the keeper of his client's conscience.  And nearly every 
day there happens instances where the most subtle casuistry will 
fail and the finger of conscience point unhesitatingly.  One may 
have worried long in the preparation and preliminaries of the issue, 
one may bring the case at last into the final court of conscience in 
an apparently hopeless tangle.  Then suddenly comes decision.

The procedure of that silent, lit, and empty court in which a man 
states his case to God, is very simple and perfect.  The excuses and 
the special pleading shrivel and vanish.  In a little while the case 
lies bare and plain.



8. THE OATH OF ALLEGIANCE


The question of oaths of allegiance, acts of acquiescence in 
existing governments, and the like, is one that arises at once with 
the acceptance of God as the supreme and real King of the Earth.  At 
the worst Caesar is a usurper, a satrap claiming to be sovereign; at 
the best he is provisional.  Modern casuistry makes no great trouble 
for the believing public official.  The chief business of any 
believer is to do the work for which he is best fitted, and since 
all state affairs are to become the affairs of God's kingdom it is 
of primary importance that they should come into the hands of God's 
servants.  It is scarcely less necessary to a believing man with 
administrative gifts that he should be in the public administration, 
than that he should breathe and eat.  And whatever oath or the like 
to usurper church or usurper king has been set up to bar access to 
service, is an oath imposed under duress.  If it cannot be avoided 
it must be taken rather than that a man should become unserviceable.  
All such oaths are unfair and foolish things.  They exclude no 
scoundrels; they are appeals to superstition.  Whenever an 
opportunity occurs for the abolition of an oath, the servant of God 
will seize it, but where the oath is unavoidable he will take it.

The service of God is not to achieve a delicate consistency of 
statement; it is to do as much as one can of God's work.



9. THE PRIEST AND THE CREED


It may be doubted if this line of reasoning regarding the official 
and his oath can be extended to excuse the priest or pledged 
minister of religion who finds that faith in the true God has ousted 
his formal beliefs.

This has been a frequent and subtle moral problem in the 
intellectual life of the last hundred years.  It has been 
increasingly difficult for any class of reading, talking, and 
discussing people such as are the bulk of the priesthoods of the 
Christian churches to escape hearing and reading the accumulated 
criticism of the Trinitarian theology and of the popularly accepted 
story of man's fall and salvation.  Some have no doubt defeated this 
universal and insidious critical attack entirely, and honestly 
established themselves in a right-down acceptance of the articles 
and disciplines to which they have subscribed and of the creeds they 
profess and repeat.  Some have recanted and abandoned their 
positions in the priesthood.  But a great number have neither 
resisted the bacillus of criticism nor left the churches to which 
they are attached.  They have adopted compromises, they have 
qualified their creeds with modifying footnotes of essential 
repudiation; they have decided that plain statements are metaphors 
and have undercut, transposed, and inverted the most vital points of 
the vulgarly accepted beliefs.  One may find within the Anglican 
communion, Arians, Unitarians, Atheists, disbelievers in 
immortality, attenuators of miracles; there is scarcely a doubt or a 
cavil that has not found a lodgment within the ample charity of the 
English Establishment.  I have been interested to hear one 
distinguished Canon deplore that "they" did not identify the Logos 
with the third instead of the second Person of the Trinity, and 
another distinguished Catholic apologist declare his indifference to 
the "historical Jesus."  Within most of the Christian communions one 
may believe anything or nothing, provided only that one does not 
call too public an attention to one's eccentricity.  The late Rev. 
Charles Voysey, for example, preached plainly in his church at 
Healaugh against the divinity of Christ, unhindered.  It was only 
when he published his sermons under the provocative title of "The 
Sling and the Stone," and caused an outcry beyond the limits of his 
congregation, that he was indicted and deprived.

Now the reasons why these men do not leave the ministry or 
priesthood in which they find themselves are often very plausible.  
It is probable that in very few cases is the retention of stipend or 
incumbency a conscious dishonesty.  At the worst it is mitigated by 
thought for wife or child.  It has only been during very exceptional 
phases of religious development and controversy that beliefs have 
been really sharp.  A creed, like a coin, it may be argued, loses 
little in practical value because it is worn, or bears the image of 
a vanished king.  The religious life is a reality that has clothed 
itself in many garments, and the concern of the priest or minister 
is with the religious life and not with the poor symbols that may 
indeed pretend to express, but do as a matter of fact no more than 
indicate, its direction.  It is quite possible to maintain that the 
church and not the creed is the real and valuable instrument of 
religion, that the religious life is sustained not by its 
propositions but by its routines.  Anyone who seeks the intimate 
discussion of spiritual things with professional divines, will find 
this is the substance of the case for the ecclesiastical sceptic.  
His church, he will admit, mumbles its statement of truth, but where 
else is truth?  What better formulae are to be found for ineffable 
things?  And meanwhile--he does good.

That may be a valid defence before a man finds God.  But we who 
profess the worship and fellowship of the living God deny that 
religion is a matter of ineffable things.  The way of God is plain 
and simple and easy to understand.

Therewith the whole position of the conforming sceptic is changed.  
If a professional religious has any justification at all for his 
professionalism it is surely that he proclaims the nearness and 
greatness of God.  And these creeds and articles and orthodoxies are 
not proclamations but curtains, they are a darkening and confusion 
of what should be crystal clear.  What compensatory good can a 
priest pretend to do when his primary business is the truth and his 
method a lie?  The oaths and incidental conformities of men who wish 
to serve God in the state are on a different footing altogether from 
the falsehood and mischief of one who knows the true God and yet 
recites to a trustful congregation, foists upon a trustful 
congregation, a misleading and ill-phrased Levantine creed.

Such is the line of thought which will impose the renunciation of 
his temporalities and a complete cessation of services upon every 
ordained priest and minister as his first act of faith.  Once that 
he has truly realised God, it becomes impossible for him ever to 
repeat his creed again.  His course seems plain and clear.  It 
becomes him to stand up before the flock he has led in error, and to 
proclaim the being and nature of the one true God.  He must be 
explicit to the utmost of his powers.  Then he may await his 
expulsion.  It may be doubted whether it is sufficient for him to go 
away silently, making false excuses or none at all for his retreat.  
He has to atone for the implicit acquiescences of his conforming 
years.



10. THE UNIVERSALISM OF GOD


Are any sorts of people shut off as if by inherent necessity from 
God?

This is, so to speak, one of the standing questions of theology; it 
reappears with slight changes of form at every period of religious 
interest, it is for example the chief issue between the Arminian and 
the Calvinist.  From its very opening proposition modern religion 
sweeps past and far ahead of the old Arminian teachings of Wesleyans 
and Methodists, in its insistence upon the entirely finite nature of 
God.  Arminians seem merely to have insisted that God has 
conditioned himself, and by his own free act left men free to accept 
or reject salvation.  To the realist type of mind--here as always I 
use "realist" in its proper sense as the opposite of nominalist--to 
the old-fashioned, over-exact and over-accentuating type of mind, 
such ways of thinking seem vague and unsatisfying.  Just as it 
distresses the more downright kind of intelligence with a feeling of 
disloyalty to admit that God is not Almighty, so it troubles the 
same sort of intelligence to hear that there is no clear line to be 
drawn between the saved and the lost.  Realists like an exclusive 
flavour in their faith.  Moreover, it is a natural weakness of 
humanity to be forced into extreme positions by argument.  It is 
probable, as I have already suggested, that the absolute attributes 
of God were forced upon Christianity under the stresses of 
propaganda, and it is probable that the theory of a super-human 
obstinancy beyond salvation arose out of the irritations natural to 
theological debate.  It is but a step from the realisation that 
there are people absolutely unable or absolutely unwilling to see 
God as we see him, to the conviction that they are therefore shut 
off from God by an invincible soul blindness.

It is very easy to believe that other people are essentially damned.

Beyond the little world of our sympathies and comprehension there 
are those who seem inaccessible to God by any means within our 
experience.  They are people answering to the "hard-hearted," to the 
"stiff-necked generation" of the Hebrew prophets.  They betray and 
even confess to standards that seem hopelessly base to us.  They 
show themselves incapable of any disinterested enthusiasm for beauty 
or truth or goodness.  They are altogether remote from intelligent 
sacrifice.  To every test they betray vileness of texture; they are 
mean, cold, wicked.  There are people who seem to cheat with a 
private self-approval, who are ever ready to do harsh and cruel 
things, whose use for social feeling is the malignant boycott, and 
for prosperity, monopolisation and humiliating display; who seize 
upon religion and turn it into persecution, and upon beauty to 
torment it on the altars of some joyless vice.  We cannot do with 
such souls; we have no use for them, and it is very easy indeed to 
step from that persuasion to the belief that God has no use for 
them.

And besides these base people there are the stupid people and the 
people with minds so poor in texture that they cannot even grasp the 
few broad and simple ideas that seem necessary to the salvation we 
experience, who lapse helplessly into fetishistic and fearful 
conceptions of God, and are apparently quite incapable of 
distinguishing between what is practically and what is spiritually 
good.

It is an easy thing to conclude that the only way to God is our way 
to God, that he is the privilege of a finer and better sort to which 
we of course belong; that he is no more the God of the card-sharper 
or the pickpocket or the "smart" woman or the loan-monger or the 
village oaf than he is of the swine in the sty.  But are we 
justified in thus limiting God to the measure of our moral and 
intellectual understandings?  Because some people seem to me 
steadfastly and consistently base or hopelessly and incurably dull 
and confused, does it follow that there are not phases, albeit I 
have never chanced to see them, of exaltation in the one case and 
illumination in the other?  And may I not be a little restricting my 
perception of Good?  While I have been ready enough to pronounce 
this or that person as being, so far as I was concerned, thoroughly 
damnable or utterly dull, I find a curious reluctance to admit the 
general proposition which is necessary for these instances.  It is 
possible that the difference between Arminian and Calvinist is a 
difference of essential intellectual temperament rather than of 
theoretical conviction.  I am temperamentally Arminian as I am 
temperamentally Nominalist.  I feel that it must be in the nature of 
God to attempt all souls.  There must be accessibilities I can only 
suspect, and accessibilities of which I know nothing.

Yet here is a consideration pointing rather the other way.  If you 
think, as you must think, that you yourself can be lost to God and 
damned, then I cannot see how you can avoid thinking that other 
people can be damned.  But that is not to believe that there are 
people damned at the outset by their moral and intellectual 
insufficiency; that is not to make out that there is a class of 
essential and incurable spiritual defectives.  The religious life 
preceded clear religious understanding and extends far beyond its 
range.

In my own case I perceive that in spite of the value I attach to 
true belief, the reality of religion is not an intellectual thing.  
The essential religious fact is in another than the mental sphere.  
I am passionately anxious to have the idea of God clear in my own 
mind, and to make my beliefs plain and clear to other people, and 
particularly to other people who may seem to be feeling with me; I 
do perceive that error is evil if only because a faith based on 
confused conceptions and partial understandings may suffer 
irreparable injury through the collapse of its substratum of ideas.  
I doubt if faith can be complete and enduring if it is not secured 
by the definite knowledge of the true God.  Yet I have also to admit 
that I find the form of my own religious emotion paralleled by 
people with whom I have no intellectual sympathy and no agreement in 
phrase or formula at all.

There is for example this practical identity of religious feeling 
and this discrepancy of interpretation between such an inquirer as 
myself and a convert of the Salvation Army.  Here, clothing itself 
in phrases and images of barbaric sacrifice, of slaughtered lambs 
and fountains of precious blood, a most repulsive and 
incomprehensible idiom to me, and expressing itself by shouts, 
clangour, trumpeting, gesticulations, and rhythmic pacings that stun 
and dismay my nerves, I find, the same object sought, release from 
self, and the same end, the end of identification with the immortal, 
successfully if perhaps rather insecurely achieved.  I see God 
indubitably present in these excitements, and I see personalities I 
could easily have misjudged as too base or too dense for spiritual 
understandings, lit by the manifest reflection of divinity.  One may 
be led into the absurdest underestimates of religious possibilities 
if one estimates people only coldly and in the light of everyday 
life.  There is a sub-intellectual religious life which, very 
conceivably, when its utmost range can be examined, excludes nothing 
human from religious cooperation, which will use any words to its 
tune, which takes its phrasing ready-made from the world about it, 
as it takes the street for its temple, and yet which may be at its 
inner point in the directest contact with God.  Religion may suffer 
from aphasia and still be religion; it may utter misleading or 
nonsensical words and yet intend and convey the truth.  The methods 
of the Salvation Army are older than doctrinal Christianity, and may 
long survive it.  Men and women may still chant of Beulah Land and 
cry out in the ecstasy of salvation; the tambourine, that modern 
revival of the thrilling Alexandrine sistrum, may still stir dull 
nerves to a first apprehension of powers and a call beyond the 
immediate material compulsion of life, when the creeds of 
Christianity are as dead as the lore of the Druids.

The emancipation of mankind from obsolete theories and formularies 
may be accompanied by great tides of moral and emotional release 
among types and strata that by the standards of a trained and 
explicit intellectual, may seem spiritually hopeless.  It is not 
necessary to imagine the whole world critical and lucid in order to 
imagine the whole world unified in religious sentiment, 
comprehending the same phrases and coming together regardless of 
class and race and quality, in the worship and service of the true 
God.  The coming kingship of God if it is to be more than hieratic 
tyranny must have this universality of appeal.  As the head grows 
clear the body will turn in the right direction.  To the mass of men 
modern religion says, "This is the God it has always been in your 
nature to apprehend."



11. GOD AND THE LOVE AND STATUS OF WOMEN


Now that we are discussing the general question of individual 
conduct, it will be convenient to take up again and restate in that 
relationship, propositions already made very plainly in the second 
and third chapters.  Here there are several excellent reasons for a 
certain amount of deliberate repetition. . . .

All the mystical relations of chastity, virginity, and the like with 
religion, those questions of physical status that play so large a 
part in most contemporary religions, have disappeared from modern 
faith.  Let us be as clear as possible upon this.  God is concerned 
by the health and fitness and vigour of his servants; we owe him our 
best and utmost; but he has no special concern and no special 
preferences or commandments regarding sexual things.

Christ, it is manifest, was of the modern faith in these matters, he 
welcomed the Magdalen, neither would he condemn the woman taken in 
adultery.  Manifestly corruption and disease were not to stand 
between him and those who sought God in him.  But the Christianity 
of the creeds, in this as in so many respects, does not rise to the 
level of its founder, and it is as necessary to repeat to-day as 
though the name of Christ had not been ascendant for nineteen 
centuries, that sex is a secondary thing to religion, and sexual 
status of no account in the presence of God.  It follows quite 
logically that God does not discriminate between man and woman in 
any essential things.  We leave our individuality behind us when we 
come into the presence of God.  Sex is not disavowed but forgotten.  
Just as one's last meal is forgotten--which also is a difference 
between the religious moment of modern faith and certain Christian 
sacraments.  You are a believer and God is at hand to you; heed not 
your state; reach out to him and he is there.  In the moment of 
religion you are human; it matters not what else you are, male or 
female, clean or unclean, Hebrew or Gentile, bond or free.  It is 
AFTER the moment of religion that we become concerned about our 
state and the manner in which we use ourselves.

We have to follow our reason as our sole guide in our individual 
treatment of all such things as food and health and sex.  God is the 
king of the whole world, he is the owner of our souls and bodies and 
all things.  He is not particularly concerned about any aspect, 
because he is concerned about every aspect.  We have to make the 
best use of ourselves for his kingdom; that is our rule of life.  
That rule means neither painful nor frantic abstinences nor any 
forced way of living.  Purity, cleanliness, health, none of these 
things are for themselves, they are for use; none are magic, all are 
means.  The sword must be sharp and clean.  That does not mean that 
we are perpetually to sharpen and clean it--which would weaken and 
waste the blade.  The sword must neither be drawn constantly nor 
always rusting in its sheath.  Those who have had the wits and soul 
to come to God, will have the wits and soul to find out and know 
what is waste, what is vanity, what is the happiness that begets 
strength of body and spirit, what is error, where vice begins, and 
to avoid and repent and recoil from all those things that degrade.  
These are matters not of the rule of life but of the application of 
life.  They must neither be neglected nor made disproportionally 
important.

To the believer, relationship with God is the supreme relationship.  
It is difficult to imagine how the association of lovers and friends 
can be very fine and close and good unless the two who love are each 
also linked to God, so that through their moods and fluctuations and 
the changes of years they can be held steadfast by his undying 
steadfastness.  But it has been felt by many deep-feeling people 
that there is so much kindred between the love and trust of husband 
and wife and the feeling we have for God, that it is reasonable to 
consider the former also as a sacred thing.  They do so value that 
close love of mated man and woman, they are so intent upon its 
permanence and completeness and to lift the dear relationship out of 
the ruck of casual and transitory things, that they want to bring 
it, as it were, into the very presence and assent of God.  There are 
many who dream and desire that they are as deeply and completely 
mated as this, many more who would fain be so, and some who are.  
And from this comes the earnest desire to make marriage sacramental 
and the attempt to impose upon all the world the outward appearance, 
the restrictions, the pretence at least of such a sacramental union.

There may be such a quasi-sacramental union in many cases, but only 
after years can one be sure of it; it is not to be brought about by 
vows and promises but by an essential kindred and cleaving of body 
and spirit; and it concerns only the two who can dare to say they 
have it, and God.  And the divine thing in marriage, the thing that 
is most like the love of God, is, even then, not the relationship of 
the man and woman as man and woman but the comradeship and trust and 
mutual help and pity that joins them.  No doubt that from the mutual 
necessities of bodily love and the common adventure, the necessary 
honesties and helps of a joint life, there springs the stoutest, 
nearest, most enduring and best of human companionship; perhaps only 
upon that root can the best of mortal comradeship be got; but it 
does not follow that the mere ordinary coming together and pairing 
off of men and women is in itself divine or sacramental or anything 
of the sort.  Being in love is a condition that may have its moments 
of sublime exaltation, but it is for the most part an experience far 
down the scale below divine experience; it is often love only in so 
far as it shares the name with better things; it is greed, it is 
admiration, it is desire, it is the itch for excitement, it is the 
instinct for competition, it is lust, it is curiosity, it is 
adventure, it is jealousy, it is hate.  On a hundred scores 'lovers' 
meet and part.  Thereby some few find true love and the spirit of 
God in themselves or others.

Lovers may love God in one another; I do not deny it.  That is no 
reason why the imitation and outward form of this great happiness 
should be made an obligation upon all men and women who are 
attracted by one another, nor why it should be woven into the 
essentials of religion.  For women much more than for men is this 
confusion dangerous, lest a personal love should shape and dominate 
their lives instead of God.  "He for God only; she for God in him," 
phrases the idea of Milton and of ancient Islam; it is the formula 
of sexual infatuation, a formula quite easily inverted, as the end 
of Goethe's Faust ("The woman soul leadeth us upward and on") may 
witness.  The whole drift of modern religious feeling is against 
this exaggeration of sexual feeling, these moods of sexual 
slavishness, in spiritual things.  Between the healthy love of 
ordinary mortal lovers in love and the love of God, there is an 
essential contrast and opposition in this, that preference, 
exclusiveness, and jealousy seem to be in the very nature of the 
former and are absolutely incompatible with the latter.  The former 
is the intensest realisation of which our individualities are 
capable; the latter is the way of escape from the limitations of 
individuality.  It may be true that a few men and more women do 
achieve the completest unselfishness and self-abandonment in earthly 
love.  So the poets and romancers tell us.  If so, it is that by an 
imaginative perversion they have given to some attractive person a 
worship that should be reserved for God and a devotion that is 
normally evoked only by little children in their mother's heart.  It 
is not the way between most of the men and women one meets in this 
world.

But between God and the believer there is no other way, there is 
nothing else, but self-surrender and the ending of self.



CHAPTER THE SIXTH

MODERN IDEAS OF SIN AND DAMNATION



1. THE BIOLOGICAL EQUIVALENT OF SIN


If the reader who is unfamiliar with scientific things will obtain 
and read Metchnikoff's "Nature of Man," he will find there an 
interesting summary of the biological facts that bear upon and 
destroy the delusion that there is such a thing as individual 
perfection, that there is even ideal perfection for humanity.  With 
an abundance of convincing instances Professor Metchnikoff 
demonstrates that life is a system of "disharmonies," capable of no 
perfect way, that there is no "perfect" dieting, no "perfect" sexual 
life, no "perfect" happiness, no "perfect" conduct.  He releases one 
from the arbitrary but all too easy assumption that there is even an 
ideal "perfection" in organic life.  He sweeps out of the mind with 
all the confidence and conviction of a physiological specialist, any 
idea that there is a perfect man or a conceivable perfect man.  It 
is in the nature of every man to fall short at every point from 
perfection.  From the biological point of view we are as individuals 
a series of involuntary "tries" on the part of an imperfect species 
towards an unknown end.

Our spiritual nature follows our bodily as a glove follows a hand.  
We are disharmonious beings and salvation no more makes an end to 
the defects of our souls than it makes an end to the decay of our 
teeth or to those vestigial structures of our body that endanger our 
physical welfare.  Salvation leaves us still disharmonious, and adds 
not an inch to our spiritual and moral stature.



2. WHAT IS DAMNATION?


Let us now take up the question of what is Sin? and what we mean by 
the term "damnation," in the light of this view of human reality.  
Most of the great world religions are as clear as Professor 
Metchnikoff that life in the world is a tangle of disharmonies, and 
in most cases they supply a more or less myth-like explanation, they 
declare that evil is one side of the conflict between Ahriman and 
Ormazd, or that it is the punishment of an act of disobedience, of 
the fall of man and world alike from a state of harmony.  Their 
case, like his, is that THIS world is damned.

We do not find the belief that superposed upon the miseries of this 
world there are the still bitterer miseries of punishments after 
death, so nearly universal.  The endless punishments of hell appear 
to be an exploit of theory; they have a superadded appearance even 
in the Christian system; the same common tendency to superlatives 
and absolutes that makes men ashamed to admit that God is finite, 
makes them seek to enhance the merits of their Saviour by the device 
of everlasting fire.  Conquest over the sorrow of life and the fear 
of death do not seem to them sufficient for Christ's glory.

Now the turning round of the modern mind from a conception of the 
universe as something derived deductively from the past to a 
conception of it as something gathering itself adventurously towards 
the future, involves a release from the supposed necessity to tell a 
story and explain why.  Instead comes the inquiry, "To what end?"  
We can say without mental discomfort, these disharmonies are here, 
this damnation is here--inexplicably.  We can, without any 
distressful inquiry into ultimate origins, bring our minds to the 
conception of a spontaneous and developing God arising out of those 
stresses in our hearts and in the universe, and arising to overcome 
them.  Salvation for the individual is escape from the individual 
distress at disharmony and the individual defeat by death, into the 
Kingdom of God.  And damnation can be nothing more and nothing less 
than the failure or inability or disinclination to make that escape.

Something of that idea of damnation as a lack of the will for 
salvation has crept at a number of points into contemporary 
religious thought.  It was the fine fancy of Swedenborg that the 
damned go to their own hells of their own accord.  It underlies a 
queer poem, "Simpson," by that interesting essayist upon modern 
Christianity, Mr. Clutton Brock, which I have recently read.  
Simpson dies and goes to hell--it is rather like the Cromwell Road--
and approves of it very highly, and then and then only is he 
completely damned.  Not to realise that one can be damned is 
certainly to be damned; such is Mr. Brock's idea.  It is his 
definition of damnation.  Satisfaction with existing things is 
damnation.  It is surrender to limitation; it is acquiescence in 
"disharmony"; it is making peace with that enemy against whom God 
fights for ever.

(But whether there are indeed Simpsons who acquiesce always and for 
ever remains for me, as I have already confessed in the previous 
chapter, a quite open question.  My Arminian temperament turns me 
from the Calvinistic conclusion of Mr. Brock's satire.)



3. SIN IS NOT DAMNATION


Now the question of sin will hardly concern those damned and lost by 
nature, if such there be.  Sin is not the same thing as damnation, 
as we have just defined damnation.  Damnation is a state, but sin is 
an incident.  One is an essential and the other an incidental 
separation from God.  It is possible to sin without being damned; 
and to be damned is to be in a state when sin scarcely matters, like 
ink upon a blackamoor.  You cannot have questions of more or less 
among absolute things.

It is the amazing and distressful discovery of every believer so 
soon as the first exaltation of belief is past, that one does not 
remain always in touch with God.  At first it seems incredible that 
one should ever have any motive again that is not also God's motive.  
Then one finds oneself caught unawares by a base impulse.  We 
discover that discontinuousness of our apparently homogeneous 
selves, the unincorporated and warring elements that seemed at first 
altogether absent from the synthesis of conversion.  We are tripped 
up by forgetfulness, by distraction, by old habits, by tricks of 
appearance.  There come dull patches of existence; those mysterious 
obliterations of one's finer sense that are due at times to the 
little minor poisons one eats or drinks, to phases of fatigue, ill-
health and bodily disorder, or one is betrayed by some unanticipated 
storm of emotion, brewed deep in the animal being and released by 
any trifling accident, such as personal jealousy or lust, or one is 
relaxed by contentment into vanity.  All these rebel forces of our 
ill-coordinated selves, all these "disharmonies," of the inner 
being, snatch us away from our devotion to God's service, carry us 
off to follies, offences, unkindness, waste, and leave us 
compromised, involved, and regretful, perplexed by a hundred 
difficulties we have put in our own way back to God.

This is the personal problem of Sin.  Here prayer avails; here God 
can help us.  From God comes the strength to repent and make such 
reparation as we can, to begin the battle again further back and 
lower down.  From God comes the power to anticipate the struggle 
with one's rebel self, and to resist and prevail over it.



4. THE SINS OF THE INSANE


An extreme case is very serviceable in such a discussion as this.

It happens that the author carries on a correspondence with several 
lunatics in asylums.  There is a considerable freedom of notepaper 
in these institutions; the outgoing letters are no doubt censored or 
selected in some way, but a proportion at any rate are allowed to go 
out to their addresses.  As a journalist who signs his articles and 
as the author of various books of fiction, as a frequent NAME, that 
is, to any one much forced back upon reading, the writer is 
particularly accessible to this type of correspondent.  The letters 
come, some manifesting a hopeless disorder that permits of no reply, 
but some being the expression of minds overlaid not at all 
offensively by a web of fantasy, and some (and these are the more 
touching ones and the ones that most concern us now) as sanely 
conceived and expressed as any letters could be.  They are written 
by people living lives very like the lives of us who are called 
"sane," except that they lift to a higher excitement and fall to a 
lower depression, and that these extremer phases of mania or 
melancholia slip the leash of mental consistency altogether and take 
abnormal forms.  They tap deep founts of impulse, such as we of the 
safer ways of mediocrity do but glimpse under the influence of 
drugs, or in dreams and rare moments of controllable extravagance.  
Then the insane become "glorious," or they become murderous, or they 
become suicidal.  All these letter-writers in confinement have 
convinced their fellow-creatures by some extravagance that they are 
a danger to themselves or others.

The letters that come from such types written during their sane 
intervals, are entirely sane.  Some, who are probably unaware--I 
think they should know--of the offences or possibilities that 
justify their incarceration, write with a certain resentment at 
their position; others are entirely acquiescent, but one or two 
complain of the neglect of friends and relations.  But all are as 
manifestly capable of religion and of the religious life as any 
other intelligent persons during the lucid interludes that make up 
nine-tenths perhaps of their lives. . . .  Suppose now one of these 
cases, and suppose that the infirmity takes the form of some cruel, 
disgusting, or destructive disposition that may become at times 
overwhelming, and you have our universal trouble with sinful 
tendency, as it were magnified for examination.  It is clear that 
the mania which defines his position must be the primary if not the 
cardinal business in the life of a lunatic, but his problem with 
that is different not in kind but merely in degree from the problem 
of lusts, vanities, and weaknesses in what we call normal lives.  It 
is an unconquered tract, a great rebel province in his being, which 
refuses to serve God and tries to prevent him serving God, and 
succeeds at times in wresting his capital out of his control.  But 
his relationship to that is the same relationship as ours to the 
backward and insubordinate parishes, criminal slums, and disorderly 
houses in our own private texture.

It is clear that the believer who is a lunatic is, as it were, only 
the better part of himself.  He serves God with this unconquered 
disposition in him, like a man who, whatever else he is and does, is 
obliged to be the keeper of an untrustworthy and wicked animal.  His 
beast gets loose.  His only resort is to warn those about him when 
he feels that jangling or excitement of the nerves which precedes 
its escapes, to limit its range, to place weapons beyond its reach.  
And there are plenty of human beings very much in his case, whose 
beasts have never got loose or have got caught back before their 
essential insanity was apparent.  And there are those uncertifiable 
lunatics we call men and women of "impulse" and "strong passions."  
If perhaps they have more self-control than the really mad, yet it 
happens oftener with them that the whole intelligent being falls 
under the dominion of evil.  The passion scarcely less than the 
obsession may darken the whole moral sky.  Repentance and atonement; 
nothing less will avail them after the storm has passed, and the 
sedulous preparation of defences and palliatives against the return 
of the storm.

This discussion of the lunatic's case gives us indeed, usefully 
coarse and large, the lines for the treatment of every human 
weakness by the servants of God.  A "weakness," just like the 
lunatic's mania, becomes a particular charge under God, a special 
duty for the person it affects.  He has to minimise it, to isolate 
it, to keep it out of mischief.  If he can he must adopt preventive 
measures. . . .

These passions and weaknesses that get control of us hamper our 
usefulness to God, they are an incessant anxiety and distress to us, 
they wound our self-respect and make us incomprehensible to many who 
would trust us, they discredit the faith we profess.  If they break 
through and break through again it is natural and proper that men 
and women should cease to believe in our faith, cease to work with 
us or to meet us frankly. . . .  Our sins do everything evil to us 
and through us except separate us from God.

Yet let there be no mistake about one thing.  Here prayer is a 
power.  Here God can indeed work miracles.  A man with the light of 
God in his heart can defeat vicious habits, rise again combative and 
undaunted after a hundred falls, escape from the grip of lusts and 
revenges, make head against despair, thrust back the very onset of 
madness.  He is still the same man he was before he came to God, 
still with his libidinous, vindictive, boastful, or indolent vein; 
but now his will to prevail over those qualities can refer to an 
exterior standard and an external interest, he can draw upon a 
strength, almost boundless, beyond his own.



5. BELIEVE, AND YOU ARE SAVED


But be a sin great or small, it cannot damn a man once he has found 
God.  You may kill and hang for it, you may rob or rape; the moment 
you truly repent and set yourself to such atonement and reparation 
as is possible there remains no barrier between you and God.  
Directly you cease to hide or deny or escape, and turn manfully 
towards the consequences and the setting of things right, you take 
hold again of the hand of God.  Though you sin seventy times seven 
times, God will still forgive the poor rest of you.  Nothing but 
utter blindness of the spirit can shut a man off from God.

There is nothing one can suffer, no situation so unfortunate, that 
it can shut off one who has the thought of God, from God.  If you 
but lift up your head for a moment out of a stormy chaos of madness 
and cry to him, God is there, God will not fail you.  A convicted 
criminal, frankly penitent, and neither obdurate nor abject, 
whatever the evil of his yesterdays, may still die well and bravely 
on the gallows to the glory of God.  He may step straight from that 
death into the immortal being of God.

This persuasion is the very essence of the religion of the true God.  
There is no sin, no state that, being regretted and repented of, can 
stand between God and man.



CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

THE IDEA OF A CHURCH



1. THE WORLD DAWN


As yet those who may be counted as belonging definitely to the new 
religion are few and scattered and unconfessed, their realisations 
are still uncertain and incomplete.  But that is no augury for the 
continuance of this state of affairs even for the next few decades.  
There are many signs that the revival is coming very swiftly, it may 
be coming as swiftly as the morning comes after a tropical night.  
It may seem at present as though nothing very much were happening, 
except for the fact that the old familiar constellations of theology 
have become a little pallid and lost something of their multitude of 
points.  But nothing fades of itself.  The deep stillness of the 
late night is broken by a stirring, and the morning star of 
creedless faith, the last and brightest of the stars, the star that 
owes its light to the coming sun is in the sky.

There is a stirring and a movement.  There is a stir, like the stir 
before a breeze.  Men are beginning to speak of religion without the 
bluster of the Christian formulae; they have begun to speak of God 
without any reference to Omnipresence, Omniscience, Omnipotence.  
The Deists and Theists of an older generation, be it noted, never 
did that.  Their "Supreme Being" repudiated nothing.  He was merely 
the whittled stump of the Trinity.  It is in the last few decades 
that the western mind has slipped loose from this absolutist 
conception of God that has dominated the intelligence of Christendom 
at least, for many centuries.  Almost unconsciously the new thought 
is taking a course that will lead it far away from the moorings of 
Omnipotence.  It is like a ship that has slipped its anchors and 
drifts, still sleeping, under the pale and vanishing stars, out to 
the open sea. . . .



2. CONVERGENT RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS


In quite a little while the whole world may be alive with this 
renascent faith.

For emancipation from the Trinitarian formularies and from a belief 
in an infinite God means not merely a great revivification of minds 
trained under the decadence of orthodox Christianity, minds which 
have hitherto been hopelessly embarrassed by the choice between 
pseudo-Christian religion or denial, but also it opens the way 
towards the completest understanding and sympathy and participation 
with the kindred movements for release and for an intensification of 
the religious life, that are going on outside the sphere of the 
Christian tradition and influence altogether.  Allusion has already 
been made to the sympathetic devotional poetry of Rabindranath 
Tagore; he stands for a movement in Brahminism parallel with and 
assimilable to the worship of the true God of mankind.

It is too often supposed that the religious tendency of the East is 
entirely towards other-worldness, to a treatment of this life as an 
evil entanglement and of death as a release and a blessing.  It is 
too easily assumed that Eastern teaching is wholly concerned with 
renunciation, not merely of self but of being, with the escape from 
all effort of any sort into an exalted vacuity.  This is indeed 
neither the spirit of China nor of Islam nor of the every-day life 
of any people in the world.  It is not the spirit of the Sikh nor of 
these newer developments of Hindu thought.  It has never been the 
spirit of Japan.  To-day less than ever does Asia seem disposed to 
give up life and the effort of life.  Just as readily as Europeans, 
do the Asiatics reach out their arms to that fuller life we can 
live, that greater intensity of existence, to which we can attain by 
escaping from ourselves.  All mankind is seeking God.  There is not 
a nation nor a city in the globe where men are not being urged at 
this moment by the spirit of God in them towards the discovery of 
God.  This is not an age of despair but an age of hope in Asia as in 
all the world besides.

Islam is undergoing a process of revision closely parallel to that 
which ransacks Christianity.  Tradition and mediaeval doctrines are 
being thrust aside in a similar way.  There is much probing into the 
spirit and intention of the Founder.  The time is almost ripe for a 
heart-searching Dialogue of the Dead, "How we settled our religions 
for ever and ever," between, let us say, Eusebius of Caesarea and 
one of Nizam-al-Mulk's tame theologians.  They would be drawn 
together by the same tribulations; they would be in the closest 
sympathy against the temerity of the moderns; they would have a 
common courtliness.  The Quran is but little read by Europeans; it 
is ignorantly supposed to contain many things that it does not 
contain; there is much confusion in people's minds between its text 
and the ancient Semitic traditions and usages retained by its 
followers; in places it may seem formless and barbaric; but what it 
has chiefly to tell of is the leadership of one individualised 
militant God who claims the rule of the whole world, who favours 
neither rank nor race, who would lead men to righteousness.  It is 
much more free from sacramentalism, from vestiges of the ancient 
blood sacrifice, and its associated sacerdotalism, than 
Christianity.  The religion that will presently sway mankind can be 
reached more easily from that starting-point than from the confused 
mysteries of Trinitarian theology.  Islam was never saddled with a 
creed.  With the very name "Islam" (submission to God) there is no 
quarrel for those who hold the new faith. . . .

All the world over there is this stirring in the dry bones of the 
old beliefs.  There is scarcely a religion that has not its Bahaism, 
its Modernists, its Brahmo Somaj, its "religion without theology," 
its attempts to escape from old forms and hampering associations to 
that living and world-wide spiritual reality upon which the human 
mind almost instinctively insists. . . .

It is the same God we all seek; he becomes more and more plainly the 
same God.

So that all this religious stir, which seems so multifold and 
incidental and disconnected and confused and entirely ineffective 
to-day, may be and most probably will be, in quite a few years a 
great flood of religious unanimity pouring over and changing all 
human affairs, sweeping away the old priesthoods and tabernacles and 
symbols and shrines, the last crumb of the Orphic victim and the 
last rag of the Serapeum, and turning all men about into one 
direction, as the ships and houseboats swing round together in some 
great river with the uprush of the tide. . . .



3. CAN THERE BE A TRUE CHURCH?


Among those who are beginning to realise the differences and 
identities of the revived religion that has returned to them, 
certain questions of organisation and assembly are being discussed.  
Every new religious development is haunted by the precedents of the 
religion it replaces, and it was only to be expected that among 
those who have recovered their faith there should be a search for 
apostles and disciples, an attempt to determine sources and to form 
original congregations, especially among people with European 
traditions.

These dispositions mark a relapse from understanding.  They are 
imitative.  This time there has been no revelation here or there; 
there is no claim to a revelation but simply that God has become 
visible.  Men have thought and sought until insensibly the fog of 
obsolete theology has cleared away.  There seems no need therefore 
for special teachers or a special propaganda, or any ritual or 
observances that will seem to insist upon differences.  The 
Christian precedent of a church is particularly misleading.  The 
church with its sacraments and its sacerdotalism is the disease of 
Christianity.  Save for a few doubtful interpolations there is no 
evidence that Christ tolerated either blood sacrifices or the 
mysteries of priesthood.  All these antique grossnesses were 
superadded after his martyrdom.  He preached not a cult but a 
gospel; he sent out not medicine men but apostles.

No doubt all who believe owe an apostolic service to God.  They 
become naturally apostolic.  As men perceive and realise God, each 
will be disposed in his own fashion to call his neighbour's 
attention to what he sees.  The necessary elements of religion could 
be written on a post card; this book, small as it is, bulks large 
not by what it tells positively but because it deals with 
misconceptions.  We may (little doubt have I that we do) need 
special propagandas and organisations to discuss errors and keep 
back the jungle of false ideas, to maintain free speech and restrain 
the enterprise of the persecutor, but we do not want a church to 
keep our faith for us.  We want our faith spread, but for that there 
is no need for orthodoxies and controlling organisations of 
statement.  It is for each man to follow his own impulse, and to 
speak to his like in his own fashion.

Whatever religious congregations men may form henceforth in the name 
of the true God must be for their own sakes and not to take charge 
of religion.

The history of Christianity, with its encrustation and suffocation 
in dogmas and usages, its dire persecutions of the faithful by the 
unfaithful, its desiccation and its unlovely decay, its invasion by 
robes and rites and all the tricks and vices of the Pharisees whom 
Christ detested and denounced, is full of warning against the 
dangers of a church.  Organisation is an excellent thing for the 
material needs of men, for the draining of towns, the marshalling of 
traffic, the collecting of eggs, and the carrying of letters, the 
distribution of bread, the notification of measles, for hygiene and 
economics and suchlike affairs.  The better we organise such things, 
the freer and better equipped we leave men's minds for nobler 
purposes, for those adventures and experiments towards God's purpose 
which are the reality of life.  But all organisations must be 
watched, for whatever is organised can be "captured" and misused.  
Repentance, moreover, is the beginning and essential of the 
religious life, and organisations (acting through their secretaries 
and officials) never repent.  God deals only with the individual for 
the individual's surrender.  He takes no cognisance of committees.

Those who are most alive to the realities of living religion are 
most mistrustful of this congregating tendency.  To gather together 
is to purchase a benefit at the price of a greater loss, to 
strengthen one's sense of brotherhood by excluding the majority of 
mankind.  Before you know where you are you will have exchanged the 
spirit of God for ESPRIT DE CORPS.  You will have reinvented the 
SYMBOL; you will have begun to keep anniversaries and establish 
sacramental ceremonies.  The disposition to form cliques and exclude 
and conspire against unlike people is all too strong in humanity, to 
permit of its formal encouragement.  Even such organisation as is 
implied by a creed is to be avoided, for all living faith coagulates 
as you phrase it.  In this book I have not given so much as a 
definite name to the faith of the true God.  Organisation for 
worship and collective exaltation also, it may be urged, is of 
little manifest good.  You cannot appoint beforehand a time and 
place for God to irradiate your soul.

All these are very valid objections to the church-forming 
disposition.



4. ORGANISATIONS UNDER GOD


Yet still this leaves many dissatisfied.  They want to shout out 
about God.  They want to share this great thing with all mankind.

Why should they not shout and share?

Let them express all that they desire to express in their own 
fashion by themselves or grouped with their friends as they will.  
Let them shout chorally if they are so disposed.  Let them work in a 
gang if so they can work the better.  But let them guard themselves 
against the idea that they can have God particularly or exclusively 
with them in any such undertaking.  Or that so they can express God 
rather than themselves.

That I think states the attitude of the modern spirit towards the 
idea of a church.  Mankind passes for ever out of the idolatry of 
altars, away from the obscene rites of circumcision and symbolical 
cannibalism, beyond the sway of the ceremonial priest.  But if the 
modern spirit holds that religion cannot be organised or any 
intermediary thrust between God and man, that does not preclude 
infinite possibilities of organisation and collective action UNDER 
God and within the compass of religion.  There is no reason why 
religious men should not band themselves the better to attain 
specific ends.  To borrow a term from British politics, there is no 
objection to AD HOC organisations.  The objection lies not against 
subsidiary organisations for service but against organisations that 
may claim to be comprehensive.

For example there is no reason why one should not--and in many cases 
there are good reasons why one should--organise or join associations 
for the criticism of religious ideas, an employment that may pass 
very readily into propaganda.

Many people feel the need of prayer to resist the evil in themselves 
and to keep them in mind of divine emotion.  And many want not 
merely prayer but formal prayer and the support of others, praying 
in unison.  The writer does not understand this desire or need for 
collective prayer very well, but there are people who appear to do 
so and there is no reason why they should not assemble for that 
purpose.  And there is no doubt that divine poetry, divine maxims, 
religious thought finely expressed, may be heard, rehearsed, 
collected, published, and distributed by associations.  The desire 
for expression implies a sort of assembly, a hearer at least as well 
as a speaker.  And expression has many forms.  People with a strong 
artistic impulse will necessarily want to express themselves by art 
when religion touches them, and many arts, architecture and the 
drama for example, are collective undertakings.  I do not see why 
there should not be, under God, associations for building cathedrals 
and suchlike great still places urgent with beauty, into which men 
and women may go to rest from the clamour of the day's confusions; I 
do not see why men should not make great shrines and pictures 
expressing their sense of divine things, and why they should not 
combine in such enterprises rather than work to fill heterogeneous 
and chaotic art galleries.  A wave of religious revival and 
religious clarification, such as I foresee, will most certainly 
bring with it a great revival of art, religious art, music, songs, 
and writings of all sorts, drama, the making of shrines, praying 
places, tempies and retreats, the creation of pictures and 
sculptures.  It is not necessary to have priestcraft and an 
organised church for such ends.  Such enrichments of feeling and 
thought are part of the service of God.

And again, under God, there may be associations and fraternities for 
research in pure science; associations for the teaching and 
simplification of languages; associations for promoting and watching 
education; associations for the discussion of political problems and 
the determination of right policies.  In all these ways men may 
multiply their use by union.  Only when associations seek to control 
things of belief, to dictate formulae, restrict religious activities 
or the freedom of religious thought and teaching, when they tend to 
subdivide those who believe and to set up jealousies or exclusions, 
do they become antagonistic to the spirit of modern religion.



5. THE STATE IS GOD'S INSTRUMENT


Because religion cannot be organised, because God is everywhere and 
immediately accessible to every human being, it does not follow that 
religion cannot organise every other human affair.  It is indeed 
essential to the idea that God is the Invisible King of this round 
world and all mankind, that we should see in every government, great 
and small, from the council of the world-state that is presently 
coming, down to the village assembly, the instrument of God's 
practical control.  Religion which is free, speaking freely through 
whom it will, subject to a perpetual unlimited criticism, will be 
the life and driving power of the whole organised world.  So that if 
you prefer not to say that there will be no church, if you choose 
rather to declare that the world-state is God's church, you may have 
it so if you will.  Provided that you leave conscience and speech 
and writing and teaching about divine things absolutely free, and 
that you try to set no nets about God.

The world is God's and he takes it.  But he himself remains freedom, 
and we find our freedom in him.



THE ENVOY


So I end this compact statement of the renascent religion which I 
believe to be crystallising out of the intellectual, social, and 
spiritual confusions of this time.  It is an account rendered.  It 
is a statement and record; not a theory.  There is nothing in all 
this that has been invented or constructed by the writer; I have 
been but scribe to the spirit of my generation; I have at most 
assembled and put together things and thoughts that I have come 
upon, have transferred the statements of "science" into religious 
terminology, rejected obsolescent definitions, and re-coordinated 
propositions that had drifted into opposition.  Thus, I see, ideas 
are developing, and thus have I written them down.  It is a 
secondary matter that I am convinced that this trend of intelligent 
opinion is a discovery of truth.  The reader is told of my own 
belief merely to avoid an affectation of impartiality and aloofness.

The theogony here set forth is ancient; one can trace it appearing 
and disappearing and recurring in the mutilated records of many 
different schools of speculation; the conception of God as finite is 
one that has been discussed very illuminatingly in recent years in 
the work of one I am happy to write of as my friend and master, that 
very great American, the late William James.  It was an idea that 
became increasingly important to him towards the end of his life.  
And it is the most releasing idea in the system.

Only in the most general terms can I trace the other origins of 
these present views.  I do not think modern religion owes much to 
what is called Deism or Theism.  The rather abstract and futile 
Deism of the eighteenth century, of "votre Etre supreme" who bored 
the friends of Robespierre, was a sterile thing, it has little 
relation to these modern developments, it conceived of God as an 
infinite Being of no particular character whereas God is a finite 
being of a very especial character.  On the other hand men and women 
who have set themselves, with unavoidable theological 
preconceptions, it is true, to speculate upon the actual teachings 
and quality of Christ, have produced interpretations that have 
interwoven insensibly with thoughts more apparently new.  There is a 
curious modernity about very many of Christ's recorded sayings.  
Revived religion has also, no doubt, been the receiver of many 
religious bankruptcies, of Positivism for example, which failed 
through its bleak abstraction and an unspiritual texture.  Religion, 
thus restated, must, I think, presently incorporate great sections 
of thought that are still attached to formal Christianity.  The time 
is at hand when many of the organised Christian churches will be 
forced to define their positions, either in terms that will identify 
them with this renascence, or that will lead to the release of their 
more liberal adherents.  Its probable obligations to Eastern thought 
are less readily estimated by a European writer.

Modern religion has no revelation and no founder; it is the 
privilege and possession of no coterie of disciples or exponents; it 
is appearing simultaneously round and about the world exactly as a 
crystallising substance appears here and there in a super-saturated 
solution.  It is a process of truth, guided by the divinity in men.  
It needs no other guidance, and no protection.  It needs nothing but 
freedom, free speech, and honest statement.  Out of the most mixed 
and impure solutions a growing crystal is infallibly able to select 
its substance.  The diamond arises bright, definite, and pure out of 
a dark matrix of structureless confusion.

This metaphor of crystallisation is perhaps the best symbol of the 
advent and growth of the new understanding.  It has no church, no 
authorities, no teachers, no orthodoxy.  It does not even thrust and 
struggle among the other things; simply it grows clear.  There will 
be no putting an end to it.  It arrives inevitably, and it will 
continue to separate itself out from confusing ideas.  It becomes, 
as it were the Koh-i-noor; it is a Mountain of Light, growing and 
increasing.  It is an all-pervading lucidity, a brightness and 
clearness.  It has no head to smite, no body you can destroy; it 
overleaps all barriers; it breaks out in despite of every enclosure.  
It will compel all things to orient themselves to it.

It comes as the dawn comes, through whatever clouds and mists may be 
here or whatever smoke and curtains may be there.  It comes as the 
day comes to the ships that put to sea.

It is the Kingdom of God at hand.